Different you! Different me!

I read in awe a story in the Daily Graphic with a message coming from one of the ministers calling on ‘me and you’ to eat Ghanaian dishes. I personally do not have a problem with these ‘food dictators’ but I ask myself what kind of leaders are we churning out lately. I am getting the impression that we the citizens of Ghana are obliged to do certain things whiles our leaders do otherwise.

It is quite marvellous to read from the newspapers lately about how Ghanaians should patronise locally manufactured goods. Interestingly our politicians in their usual ‘leading’ role seem to be in the forefront of this patriotic ensemble.

If one should sit behind the TV this evening (and subsequent ones) after reading this article and do a headcount of the number of Ministers and Parliamentarians who appear on the news wearing locally made attires I am sure after three days you will join my camp! Some of them are not the least embarrassed to show off their latest Western designer wears from head to toe!! Do they and their families even eat our traditional Ghanaian dishes? I am sure it doesn’t take ‘ochokobila’ to know the answer to that.

Still on the family, how many of our leaders even encourage their kids in the universities to even stay here during holidays to teach or do other attachment programmes to benefit our nation Ghana. Yet they are the first to mount platforms and sing about all the wrongs with students running away to ‘work’ outside. What they do not realise that as ‘mentors’, the youth are learning from them. So if they are realising something wrong about us then they have to start checking some of their acts. The youth in Ghana have come a long way and currently, there is a seemingly great awareness of current issues by the Ghanaian youth. There seems to be a great thirst for information because gradually the youth of today realise the significance of staying on top of issues and the need to take their future in their own hands. I am looking forward to the day when a Minister or Parliamentarian will boldly mount a platform and brag that he/she, had all his/her education in Ghana our motherland. patronises made in Ghana goods. ensures that the children ‘enjoy’ our good educational system. has been in the country more times than abroad in the last six months.

All Ghanaians will definitely applaud this person and if he/she is lucky they might probably feature in the President’s National Awards next year!

Our leaders encourage us to avoid being bribed to vote!! Come December 2008 we shall see if the receiver or the giver will trigger this! Or has it started already? Doing my National Service at a very key public institution, it is with much sadness that I have to admit that some of our leaders are really taking us the youth of this nation for a very ‘joyous’ ride! We look up to them for inspiration and trust me if seeing them on TV and hearing them talk on radio stations is your only connection to this inspiration then you must be ‘really inspired’! Some of them are just ‘talking parrots’ who will go to the extent of signalling any reporter to come interview them. I am not saying all our leaders are guilty of this but some, if not most, are just the wrong source of inspiration to us the youth. In December 2008, the youth of Ghana should vote to choose leaders who have the future of our generation at heart and not anyone who is able to show off his affluence!! We should learn to be responsible for the kind of people we choose to lead us and put a stop to the abundant ‘item 13’ leaders who have infested the health of our future.

As Oswald Boateng said ‘there seems to be too much intellectual talk and less action in Africa’. Well I cannot agree less Oswald! The message coming from these leaders is clear, ‘different us, different them!’ Oh! Our ‘caring’ leaders!

Kwame Opoku Berchie
National Service Personnel

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