Suddenly the Chiana-Paga constituency has become a tourist attraction: a trip this time to see the Chiana girls with sharp teeth. I have never been to the Chiana town itself in Upper East, except that crocodiles once invited me to Paga. That was 2017; and Salifu my driver from Bolga safely delivered me to them. The encounter with my crocodile friends should be another story.
Some 35 kilometres from Paga is Chiana, a small town now trending in the social media. At a time parents and pupils desperately search for great high schools to upgrade the learning of kids, here comes the Chiana Senior High School, the site of a viral video where 8 girls have made their town great, brazenly abusing Ghana’s highest citizen, the first gentleman of the Republic. The words they used are simply unprintable, unsayable, and clearly of a filthier order than their age. Anybody debating possible disciplinary responses to the incident, should please watch the video again, and analyze the diction and body language of the little girls. These could be whiz kids. Listening to them in a penitential mood later, they sound smart, eloquent, articulate, but doomed simply because ill bred. In a matter of weeks, a committee is formed; sittings begin; sentence passed; dismissals; apologies; tear drops; oh! their future; these are girls; Occupy Ghana; future leaders; presidential intervention, and the murky waters turn quiet; the turbidity now settles at the base. Happily the presidential intervention does not say, ‘touch not my anointed;’ it is only a call for leniency.
In all this, I have not heard a single word on ‘whose kids are these, and what school brought them up, who is the Head? Are there internal regulations? Browsing their website, I notice in the Vision of Chiana SHS the following words: “To be a centre of excellence in training youth with high morals and integrity, being the hallmarks for a better society.” Eiiiii. With such a golden vision, a caring school would have screamed and even convulsed seeing the viral video; they would immediately convene to take swift disciplinary action on their own. The school with its board of governors, as it were, probably went to bed, and invited GES to interfere. And now finally comes a magnanimous president, quitting critical engagements on the IMF, and stepping in to plead mercy. Can the president sometimes cock his ears, look elsewhere, and allow the system to work? A country where everything including celebrity obituaries, are referred directly to the president and none other, invites dictatorship upon its head. In the next breath, you and I would then carry placards seeking constitutional amendments because the president has too much power.
Fortunately, the mass media took us to the poor, deprived homes of the wayward girls when the dust had settled; and it tells you, these are precisely the pupils Government had in mind introducing a free SHS to rescue. Poor parents, poor homes, squalid surroundings. A Good Samaritan thinks outside the box, and hands you a completely free senior high school (not without challenges though); and in an expression of gratitude, you go on the offensive, cursing the hand that fed you, in unprintable language, including vulgar references to the nether parts of the human anatomy. Whaat! Will the relevant parents, teachers, the school and the board, bow their heads in shame, for the way they are bringing up our kids to serve Mother Ghana.
But listen also to colleagues who choose to be completely fed on a diet of free speech and the constitution. They would cite the pink book, including daily insults poured on K A. Busia in the early 1970s by Kaneshie market women, whenever he was on his way from his residence at Odorkor to the Osu Castle. Should we then adopt open insult as part of presidential greetings? Dr Busia in his humility used no convoys, and no sirens in his passage through Kaneshie traffic. He sat quietly through the heavy market traffic in his small saloon car without a motorcade every morning. The routine abuse of ‘Busia Naabu,’ by the market women as Busia passed, became a daily routine and eventually lost any venom left. No longer an insult; call it a routine poetic abuse. It even attracted a cloth name.
But wait a minute. The Chiana girls with sharp teeth did not act in a vacuum. That is the penalty a sovereign nation suffers when we are silent on a new norm emerging on our landscape: the uncouth booing of our president as he speaks at a global concert in Accra; booing at him in his passage through the Eastern region; openly hooting at our vice-president at a Hogbetsotso festival in Anloga. It all looks as if we have been enjoying our gradual descent into political mayhem. So then, with what moral right do we express shock, on hearing presidential curses from Chiana school girls? These are smart students, whiz kids only learning from role models at home and school.
And as all this happens with impunity, why would the nation’s ‘White House’ not be defiled by an invasion of faceless artists from the Diaspora, draped in T shirt, beach wear, and charlie wote, polluting the hallowed space of Africa’s Black Star? Their mission being simply to turn our Jubilee House into Hollywood studios; and they had their way.
The invading force knew this would be forgiven by a Bible reading Ghana. Matthew 18, verse 21. “How many times should my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Is it as many as seven times?” Wrong.
Jesus said ‘not seven times, but seventy times seven.’ Yewu!
At this point, dear colleague, let me end here; Pastor Mensah Otabil may be reading my Facebook.