Why Do We Do Us In?

I will ever keep narrating these two stories when, in the first, a team of personal security staff and a uniformed policeman, drove away one respected Ghanaian professor of religion, when he had wanted to board his private car in front of the arrival lounge at the Kotoka International Airport. Minutes later, a man of Asian extraction, came out and was allowed to board his car right at the same spot the Ghanaian professor was disallowed.

Second, during the premier of the Passion of Christ at the International Conference Center, a young mother was denied access with her son, because of age restriction. The boy, who looked twelve years of age, was well below the allowed age of minimum eighteen, to watch that film. However, some Indian families were allowed to watch with their children of between eight and ten years.

The question of why do we do ourselves in is mind boggling. At the KIA, a Ghanaian passport holder is treated like a foreigner at the entry point. Long queues and interrogations can make one spend hours for the only crime of returning to one's God blessed, homeland. Meanwhile, foreign passport holders will just sail through with beautiful smiles of "Welcome to Ghana" from the Ghanaian officials at the entry points. And the Ghanaian will be treated like some alien, who is coming to do illegal business in town. And also, it may seem as if he will be bundled back on the next available plane to whenever he came from.

At the airport or any entry point into the country, Ghanaian travellers wonder whether they are really back home. On their travels abroad, they see how national passport holders were given red carpet treatment, while they, the foreign Ghanaians, can stay in slow moving queues for hours as each gets long periods of interrogations. I remember joining maybe a one kilometre long queue at one airport abroad. The barriers were arranged in a way that one had to walk almost fifty metres to one end, and turn to go another fifty to the other, and this went one until one finally meets with the immigration officers. And back home, you receive the same treatment, and you have every reason to ask yourself whether it was worth it being a Ghanaian.

In the field of soccer, Ghana is now found lost in the African Cup of Nations, since 1982, when we last won the cup. Thirty-five years on, and we have not written our names on the list of champions. We won the trophy four times only, and that was with Ghanaian coaches. Then we turned to expatriates, and, to date, we only saw the trophy an arm's length away in 1992, 2010 and 2015, when we became losing finalists.

We have completely abandoned the Ghanaian coaches all these while for expatriate ones, until, only recently, when we brought in Kwesi Appiah. We decided to dump him after the World Cup fiasco in Brazil, and run back to him after all seems lost in our bid to make a fourth consecutive appearance in the FIFA World Cup.

The question is if we can only form a national team with Ghanaians, and we have Ghanaians who have played good soccer for this nation and are in the coaching vocation, why don't we upgrade our own and use them for local and national clubs, instead of bastardising them by looking elsewhere for coaches, who are in themselves not highly rated abroad? Some of these coaches only come and use Ghana to better their CVs, and go bidding for top clubs after their sojourn here.

Why do we do us in? This is the question I keep asking myself, when it came to light that some Russians and Ukrainians had been engaging in illegal mining for the past quarter of a century. Aside from this, they had full protection from the Ghana Armed Forces. It is shocking that the men in green were assigned to grab poor villagers in the middle of the night, and put them under full military torture for doing nothing at all, but committing the crime of living around a gold mine, and they were warned not to look at the foreigners with disgust, worse of all, not to attempt to drive them away.

It is not possible under military regulations for soldiers to undergo such operations without the high command being aware of it. In fact, the military are a very disciplined group of persons, who are taught of the need to comport themselves in public.

A soldier violates military code when he beats up a civilian, especially, for no reason at all, but just to show that he wields power. It is only allowed when it comes to self-defense. So, if a civilian beats up a military personnel, then he has invited trouble.

What is not acceptable, is for the military to descend upon innocent civilians to discipline them. And that was what happened to the natives of Amadan, a small town in the Ashanti Region, when someone sent uniformed men to discipline the inhabitants, so as to put the fear of God in them, because some Russians and Ukrainians wanted to practice their vices in peace.

One can entertain doubts that they could be from the military due to their strict code of conduct. But, on the other hand, it could be possible that some rogue officer could use troops under him to go on such an operation.

Whether they were true soldiers or fake ones, the bottom line is that some Ghanaians are prepared to put other Ghanaians in bondage in their own country. Some Ghanaians want to treat other Ghanaians as second or third class citizens, for the sake of protecting the foreigner, while violating the rights of the true citizen and native of the land.

It is a great shame how people who use powers invested in them by the community, and by the people, to rather enslave them.

This galamsey/illegal/small-scale mining is getting murkier and murkier that now Ghanaians are ready to kill their own kith and kin just to allow the foreigner to do illegal business in this country.

Could someone then push a motion that we should invite our colonial masters to come back and rule us? I think they may protect us better than what our own are doing. I will second that motion, what about you? We can't just be doing us in.

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