The parable of the little bald-headed tinker

Don’t you think that a man of this sort looks exactly like a little bald-headed tinker (A tinker is someone who mends metal utensils for a living, often moving from place to place) who has come into some money and, having been just released from jail, has taken a bath, put on a new cloak, got himself up as a bridegroom, and about to marry the boss’s daughter because she is poor and abandoned?

And what kind of children will that marriage produce? Won’t they be illegitimate and inferior?

The above analogy is by the character of Socrates, in Plato, the Republic, Book VI, 495e. The entire work is a narration of a long conversation Socrates has with his friends about the nature of justice.

Socrates, having found the nature of justice in the ideal state (which he lays out elaborately) proceeds to make the audacious and profound claim that such a state can only be brought into reality if philosophers became leaders or leaders, philosophers (the Philosopher King).

However, Adeimantus, brother of Plato, retorts, “How dare you say something like that, Socrates?” Does this city, based on our experience, lack philosophers who are useless, good for nothing, and vicious? Can such philosophers be the guardians of a state that instills civic virtue and delivers it from evil (the nature of the ideal state)?

This is where Plato introduces the character of the little bald-headed tinker described above. These are the possers, what in pidgin language we call “the packagers”. They have crooked and mutilated souls which deprive them, in the least, of the full complement of qualities for philosophy, yet present themselves as such.

If an individual of such kind, through his cunning and pretentious exterior, succeeds in “wifing- up” the state in her period of humiliation, what would be the nature of the forebears of that union?

Indeed, did not Nkrumah’s beloved Princess feel humiliated and abandoned under the conditions of dumsor; the Ford Expedition gift; the flight of the guinea fowls to Burkina Faso, and the trip to the IMF?

And in her feeling of disgrace and abandonment did not the little bald-headed tinker “package” himself as the most eligible bachelor worthy of her hand in marriage?

And what has been the nature of their offspring?

Would they not include the following: a tournament-size Supreme Court called Unanimous FC; a Galamsey Republic; the interment of civil protests and the resurrection of detention without trial; political exclusion based on geography; establishment of a corruption clearing agency; debt accumulation as a profit-making exercise, producing the highest debt to GDP ratio ever recorded;
a worthless currency; and promise of a Christian cathedral (to continue the grift with the glamor), which now sits as the largest manmade hole in the middle of a city?

And aren't there messes in the premises of churches, media houses, and think tanks, from the endless deliveries of humble pie, and daily smashing of eggs on the faces of their various leading personnel?

And is this little bald-headed tinker not also called leaned with no accompanying degree?

Having seen his true character and the nature of his offspring, won’t we be right to call him an imposter who lacks the true philosophic nature and therefore unworthy to lead our polity?

And would anyone who takes after him be any better?