Features
Corruption and hypocrisy (Part 2)
Hypocrisy is what is destroying this country. Most Ghanaians, accuse other people for the problems of this country except themselves. If we cast our minds to the early days and weeks of the Covid-19 era, we recall the general hikes in prices of items.
The increase in prices of items that are produced outside the country can be justified due to freight charges that had increased astronomically within a short period. What is ridiculous and can never be justified are the prices of food items like gari and beans which are produced in Ghana. The price of an ‘Olonka’of gari doubled all of a sudden and even tripled at some market places.
A story is told of a lady who had gone to buy a few bags of rice from a distributor shop with a budget of GH¢300 per bag. The owner of the shop, informed her that one of his customers had just bought the last batch from him so she should go there since it was not very far from his shop.
Not long afterwards, the woman returned to the distributor’s shop complaining to him as to why he had increased the prices so much that the lady was selling to her at GH¢700 per bag.
The distributor became angry and informed her that he was going to get back his rice because the woman who came for the last batch was very greedy and that he gave them to her at GH¢300 per bag on credit. Is such price hikes the fault of the President?
I am very sure that this lady is either a Christian or a Muslim, since these two groups form the majority of the population in Ghana. We make Christianity unattractive to unbelievers.
The Bible speaks against greediness and although I am not very familiar with the Quran, I am sure it says the same and therefore this makes the behaviour of this greedy woman despicable.
Should this woman be caught in a traffic offence and an unpatriotic policeman extort money from her, I can imagine her hypocritically ranting about the level of corruption in the Ghana police service, conveniently ignoring her spiritual corruption regarding her greediness.
Most Ghanaians who are public and civil servants can be said to be magicians. If you look at the salaries they receive and their expenditure, that is the conclusion you will arrive at. If you ask them how they manage to survive, they claim hypocritically, “it is by the grace of God.”
Meanwhile, they know very well that it is by their own scheming. There are those who take money before they fast-track processing of documents, those who are involved in taking bribes to help importers cheat the government, policemen on our roads on a routine daily ritual of extortion, market women reducing the volume of various measuring containers used in selling food items like gari, rice through various disingenuous ways; the list is endless.
We are all eager to see our country develop to the status of countries like South Korea and Singapore who were our co-equals in the late 50’s to early 60’s but are way out of our league now.
A characteristic which are absent in those countries are corruption and hypocrisy.
These are unhealthy attitudes that using computer terminology, must be deleted from our lives in every sphere of endeavour as a nation to ensure our growth and therefore development to move from Ghana begging for aid to a Ghana beyond aid.
Hypocrisy makes us erroneously believe that we are not the problem but it is the other person.
By Laud Kissi-Mensah