Are we the nation others think we are?

In 1970, a foreign diplomat who used to consult me on what to make of the policies of the newly elected Progress Party Government in Ghana looked me in the eye and told me I was putting too liberal a slant on the PP’s actions.

“They are NOT the people we thought they were,” he said.

This was during the days when the PP had given millions of “illegal residents” from other African countries TWO WEEKS to obtain “residence permits” or quit the country.

It was a crazy idea that was impossible to implement and thousands of people were reduced to sleeping by the wayside in the hope that they would be able to join the long queues at the designated government offices the next day to try their luck at obtaining the loathsome permits. If they failed, the only thing left for them to do was to find a lorry “home” to Nigeria, Togo or any of the other neighbouring countries, from where they had flocked to Ghana in search of better living conditions.

Now, stupid actions bring unexpected consequences and as the “aliens” littered the streets of Accra in particular, the Government came under pressure to look after them.  It handed them to — the GHANA ARMY, which boarded them at its barracks and shared its “rations” with them. In Accra the task of organising care for the “aliens” fell to the Commander of the  First Infantry Brigade, a man called Col. I K ACHEAMPONG! Heard that name before?

No, it wasn’t only foreign diplomats who were disgusted at the pain and other hardships that a Government full of intellectuals had inflicted on thousands of people without adequate notice, and some Army officers saw the action as indicating that the Government might be an amateurish one that didn’t “plan” before acting, so they used the badly executed expulsion of “aliens” as one of the excuses to be used to overthrow the Busia Government. (Not that the Army chaps did all that much better in government than the people they overthrew!)

 What I am driving at is that civilian governments should endeavour to close all the avenues that can delude the military into thinking that they could run the country better than those currently running it.

As far as I can see — and I have seen quite a bit with regard to administration’s in Ghana –the failure of both the  previous and current Governments to uproot the  galamsey canker ought to make all of us very uneasy.

In a future article I shall outline (yet again!) the measures that can kill off the menace.

 BY CAMERON DUODU

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