E-Lab is yet to come to terms with how we came to agree that eating humble pie is awfully undesirable. Eating humble pie is delicious. And all that stands between the country’s peace or pieces is a simple piece of humble pie.
The political commentary these past four weeks on Facebook leaves you with a foreboding sense that guts and guns could determine who wins the elections.
Making laws to control speech and commentary is fine. But baking humble pies so the arrogant can eat and say sorry, will cure all our worries.
How do we do this?
When we say Ghana is a peaceful country we have said something as glaringly obvious as saying the weather has clouds in it. And yet when we say war is unlikely in Ghana, we are saying something as glaringly naive as saying lightening is unlikely during rain.
Peace is like the clouds – It is there. War is like lightening – it is always instant. And as surely as cloud-holding rain invites lightening so surely does peace invite trouble.
One excited brush between NDC electrons and NPP protons is all the lightening needed to spark a loud boom in the political weather covering our transient lives.
Violence is a threat as stark as women are famed for mood swings.
E-Lab is not too keen about the Montie saga. A greater worry is the little little arguments you read on long threads on social media where a facebook politician just cannot bring himself to say ‘ hey I got it wrong. I am sorry. Let’s move on’.
The condemnation of the Montie comments, yes we must. But we also know that condemnation never works. Because condemnation only works a sense of shame and a sense of wonder.
Right now in Ghana, these two senses don’t make sense to the Facebook politician and the actual politician. Herein lies the heart of the problem in our tense politics.
There is no problem bigger in this country than a deep lack of wonder and a lack of shame. Take this NDC response to the Supreme Court judgement. It is not serious because it is not sincere. But politicians are the most privately sincere people who have agreed to be publicly dishonest because they have mutually agreed that sincerity doesn’t win the public.
You don’t have to take this from E-Lab. Just read the statement, close your eyes and mentally remove Mugabe from jail and replace him with Kennedy Agyapong or Kofi Jumah. Now read the NDC statement again.
When a man is shameless and wonder-less, he is incapable of accepting condemnation or giving praises. Because of my new-found appetite for brevity, let’s focus on the lack of wonder.
When a man wakes up alive, he should be surprised that he is not dead. But he is not. When we see a relative with healthy limbs, we are not shocked that he is not limping badly.
A deeper sign of pride is when everything is ordinary. When a man feels entitled to everything. But nothing is ordinary for the meek because he does not expect it.
If you think about it carefully, you would soon see that those who really enjoy ordinary life are those who have faced extraordinary threat to life. A motor accidents has a weird way of reconstructing life by damaging it. It is because, for the survivor, life is no longer about an expensive new shoe, it is a free, faithful old leg.
The best way to enjoy any good thing — including peace — is to think that you might actually not be entitled to it. Immediately, we come into light from darkness, the eyes involuntarily shut out abundant rays. It is because even for the eyes, the light is too good to be true. Only people engrossed in darkness enjoy light best.
The reason why these Facebook politicians and actual politicians talk the way they do is not really because they don’t care about war, it is because they expect peace to remain peaceful. And because they expect it to remain so, they fail to truly appreciate it, to truly believe that peace like the constant clouds can actually vanish.
Expectation kills appreciation. When we fail to be surprised by peace, we are set to welcome war. The average Ghanaian mentality needed for this election is best seen in the last scene of Beasts of No Nation. Agu (Abraham Attah), a child solider had great nightmares of his violent days when blood filled the earth and screams of dying soldiers filled the air.
And after he survives the night and the day comes, he had a look of wonder and holy fear on his face. Frightened by the night, he was surprised by the day. The sun was still there, the shore was still there, the ordinary was still there and it was wonderful to him that all these mundane things were still there.
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