I love my ‘Ghanaian peoples’—their sense of priority seems to have gone with the many years of ‘dumsor’ or swept away by the annual floods.
In the last few days, following the Paris attack, several Ghanaians shaded their Facebook profile photos in France’s colours and the assault on these people was brutal.
Nevertheless, I loved the conversation, the anger and the fact that such a trivial show of support to humanity was clothed in politics and all manner of hostilities at the back of twisted logics.
Now, in the last few hours, it has emerged that 20 million Ghanaians do not have improved toilet facilities in 2015 and that Ghana is the second top country in Africa when it comes to shitting outside.
This news is deeply worrying considering the health risk, evidently, the annual chorea outbreaks in Ghana.
And then it also emerged that, Ghana’a power minister who promised to end load shedding by the end of this year or resign is playing smart; saying, he promised to end load shedding and not ‘dumsor’—leaving some of us in a pool of confusion: what’s the difference between ‘dumsor’ and load shedding in reality.
The lack of Ghana’s social media population’s sense of priority follows that; instead of aggressively and passionately discussing these somewhat very important issues in the same way we launched assault rifles on the Paris issue; we don’t seem to care.
Not a lot on my friends’ list have commented or said a thing—my timeline became Paris battlefield, but on these issues, it’s dead.
Perhaps, they have not heard of these deeply worrying developments—more reasonably, they don’t care about their own problems.
Ironically, these people will get upset when the West ignores the plights of Ghanaians or Africans as a whole.
Though far different, cholera has killed more people in Ghana than ISIS has killed in Paris or the whole of Africa. Yet, we don’t care, when we can actually easily fight our enemy compared to the fight against ISIS.
The conversations we hold on social media and the issues we concern ourselves with on the web tell a lot about our mindset, direction and world view.
We are a very interesting people; at best our story is good for comedy.
And we say our president has no sense of priority? The discourse says the same about us the citizens. The value is the same!
We have to change as a people and it has to be now.