Government must fix Ghana but we ourselves need fixing too (part 1)

The good book says if your right hand causes you to sin cut it off and this is just one of the down to earth admonishings the good book gives us.So if the system causes us to worry ,to make ends meet at all cost , even resorting to crime,if a system is the cause of this cut off that system.Can you decide to delete yourself from your country? its a big no, some may do by leaving and forgetting all about Ghana, you marry ,naturalize and disappear into a foreign system but that is hard for some of us because we have family here and a lot more so this kind of approach is hard for us.All the guys i grew up with in Roman Ridge deleted themselves so i could join them but i am here so i would talk,just as many Ghanaians are talking and would continue to talk, # fix the country now.

The alarm bells are sounding , this Prophet of doom who says it and it always comes to pass is speaking again, this talking is not just empty ooo,the things i said about a youth uprising which is not new, there is a National Security report to the effect that the young and unemployed are becoming a national Security threat if care is not taken.You remember my post on Parliament new composition and i said it may not change things as we expect and gave the Lion and hyena analogy and it came to pass Ndc started having issues with Parliament and a cross section of Ghanaians too had issues.What i am about to say wont please both Ndc and Npp.I am disappointed with the Cpp my party and Ivor Greenstreet said we did not shock the two major parties, well his electricity was too weak,it could not even power a mobile phone charger.There is this chap Twene Jonas who speaks a lot, many have insulted him, but you may not like his approach but hey what is the message?is he not speaking the truth,yes ''Glass nkooaa'', a typical bushman who suddenly finds himself on the streets of Los Angeles and cannot control his emotions.All those beautiful infrastructure was not through Gold or diamond trade,it was hard work and discipline,discipline not only by the President and Government machinery, but on the part of the people too.Honesty played a key role and you ask yourself if every soil in Ghana has a bit of diamond or gold why the crunching poverty levels.We could also have glass nkooaaa buildings and glass nkooaaa roads.Our transport system could be same, school buses moving every 5 minutes to pick up school kids, we could have the greyhound buses moving every 5 minutes to pick passengers instead of the dilapidated and never maintained trotro vehicles.

Lets take a walk down memory lane, i am not a hundred years old, neither am i futuristic person like John the Baptist announcing the coming of a new Ghana,I am speaking about the past and juxtaposing with the present. I am in my mid to late forties but thank God i have good memory, a long one, not a short one, so unlike some people who are in the 70's whom when you speak about their time its like they have forgotten everything, but strangely they dont forget their names or the girls they dated 53 years ago.I grew up in a Ghana that was ruled by Kutu Acheampong, i knew the standards of living then, yes i was just in Nursery in the mid 70's,and at armed forces primary we had school feeding.There was this blue Ford Transit van that carried the ''bofrot'' and rice water porridge or tombrown with bread rolls that fed us at break time.So i referred to that model of ford van as ''bofrot car'',and anytime i come across any though very rare now i refer to it as ''the bofrot car'', but politicians like JAK would lie to you that he introduced school feeding.Lets carry on, as a kid growing up in Accra and Tema briefly then, when i went to class one there was the OSA buses, they had bus stops all over Accra and Tema and the Regions, but it was there before i was born anyway, my mum tells me of the King Kong buses of the 1950's.Now the OSA buses were Willowbrook models built in Ghana.The plant is still at Dzorwulu today next to Perez Chapel.The Autosan bus building plant is still at Dzorwulu,just after the Willowbrook plant, later on Renault buses were also built there and this was in the 1990's.Then GNTC motors division which was active right into the 1990's built Mercedes buses.Then UAC Motors who built Bedford Mimo buses that the training colleges and Secondary schools used.OSA Willowbrook buses had this special clutchless transmission and i remember they moved with time. The main terminal was at Opera, all the bus stops at Opera where you get the Tema buses stop, Adabraka, stop , Nungua etc etc have been demolished because its now a car park.We had the Neoplan bus plant at Achimota, only surviving bus building that is fighting hard to survive.There were the private garages that built the Nissan UD buses.Some neighboring African countries still have those.

I grew up in a bungalows, from Takoradi, to Koforidua, to Accra and initially Ashanti Mampong where my Dad was a DCE. I still travel around and see the old bungalows in Windy Ridge at Takoradi, but what is happening in Accra ?the bungalows have been sold to private developers and you wonder is the civil /public service shut down? is it that we no longer have the class 1, class 4 officers, Directors and Chief Directors of the various Government Ministries,sure we have them so who provides these public officers with accommodation. The days of PWD when you call on the works Department to fix any broken item in the house and all these were motivating for our public servants so then they served diligently and honestly, service to country was the motto and my dad was an example. Today we have a civil service that is being run by politicians so our civil service is a pale shadow of itself and no longer the house of technocrats with in depth competence like the Nathan Quao's,Robert Dodoo etc etc all of the past era who were top civil servants.

Twene Jonas is right we have just replaced one useless leader after the other and i am sad to say this but for me the military regimes with all their faults did better than this democratic leaders we are or have experienced.I would continue but let me stop here for now.When i delve into each sector we would come to terms with the harm that we have done to ourselves,not only government must fix itself and Ghana, but we the citizens too .Look this is food for thought why is it that when you drive around town people knock down traffic lights , knock down street lights but when nothing was there no vehicle ever crossed the pavements or medians.Just along the Fire Service training school there is a fetish in the middle of the road, no vehicle has ever run into it ,but if it had been a traffic light that was there somebody would have rammed into it,think of it dont we ourselves need fixing?But Government carries the bigger blame, however there is a big But.