The Stockholm Syndrome, Ghanaian Style

Some of you might know what it is. Simply put, when you are kidnapped and you begin to sympathize with your abductors, and begin to appreciate every little favor thrown your way, you are a victim of this.

Yea, such crap. You are a smart person and do not fall for stuff like this. I have some news for you: the joke is on you. Unless you are not a Ghanaian living in Ghana. I will ask permission of Kofi Gbedemah, my facebook friend, to take a picture off his Facebook wall. It is a moving sight of Accra in the early sixties, to be precise, between 1961 and 1962. For many, the significance is lost, but for me it tells a story.

It tells a story of a nation with promise that slowly traded a piece of itself everyday for misery, like a junkie that slowly sells everything he or she has just to get a high. In our case, it is a dangerous cocktail of feelings, and a mix of peddlers who have snickered and enriched themselves at our destruction.

Every pothole in the streets of Accra, and all our major transport routes, are like the needles that a heroine junkie will have on all his major arteries, or veins just to plug in a shot. Every open gutter is like the rotten teeth of a crystal meth addict, every bout of low power like the cocaine addict knocked off cold.

We have been high on our ego, thinking we are still the best thing in Africa. We have mixed the pills of ineptitude, corruption and bold carelessness and watched as adults who have neglected their children in a ghetto of underdevelopment. We, the children in this ghetto, have been so deprived of basic necessities that we are now aloof and immune.

Like the psychology of captives, we now praise our abductors, the politicians, for every crumb and token thrown our way. We have paid taxes all our lives, watched our parents pay SSNIT all their lives. Yet we have been brainwashed to clap at the fact that, since 1968, we have barely doubled our energy supply. We have to praise governments for raising literacy rates by only 10 to 15% since 1957. We have to run to the streets and celebrate governments that have sunk us into debt, eulogize those that begged us out of it, and be grateful for others that have sunk us into even deeper debt.

As if that is not enough, we are not to question the ruling class, because we chose them. We are not to question their mandate, because it has been inked in gold. We fight against ourselves to please our captors. We fight hard, sometimes destroying people’s careers, just so we are seen as loyal servants to some “cause”. Tell me, how many of you staunch supporters understand what it means to be either a social democrat or a private growth led economist?

For those who so extol the virtues of dead politicians, after reading their biographies from anecdotal sources, what else do you really know about what they believed in? If they you were alive when they were, when they faced real battles and oppression, would you have  manned up to stand by them? Now that the going is cozy, and you are assured of perks, it is enough of a motivation for you to bide your time for an appointment, a better place at funerals, or in a church, all the time stomping on people who only mean well to others.

Yes, our biggest opiate is the sycophancy and hypocrisy that has controlled us  and made us captives, grovelling for favor among those who feed into that thought process.

If we had an abundance of options, if we handn’t slowly glorified hero worship, we wont be clamoring for titles, paying money just to be called Drs, Pastors, Professors, etc. If we grew and understood the virtues of merit, we wont be shackled by the overwhelming need to be noticed because we sing the loudest praises.

We can only emancipate ourselves. Its either that, or we will praise the nation into doom.