We have seen this scenario before; a band of able-bodied young men storming government offices and scaring the living daylights out of poor workers, driving the shaken civil servants out and assuming control all under the pretense of doing a public good, fighting corruption
So it was that last week, according to various media reports, a bunch of young men identified as members of the ruling NPP youth wing, brazenly marched to the offices of the National Sports Authority in Tamale and demanded the ouster of the Chief Executive, Hajia Salamatu.
The young men trotted out the usual mundane rationale for their action; she is irredeemably corrupt and therefore must go. Hajia Salamatu’s co-workers cowered in fear, petrified of being physically assaulted if they resisted.
That this act of supreme lawlessness would take place for the umpteenth time is shocking and incredulous. Remember the various acts of disobedience and defiance by the youth wings of the NPP in several parts of the country right at the beginning of the party’s rule?
And how can we forget the abject failure of NPP party elders to put down their foot and get these boys in line? And to top it off, how many times have Ghanaians been assured and reassured by President Nana Akuffo Addo and his lieutenants that this nagging problem will be solved once and for all?
Yet day in and day out, Ghanaians bear witness to the dastardly and cowardly acts of these boys, their attacks on our institutions and on our civil servants and the irony of it all, they go unpunished, unreprimanded, unscathed only to turn up the next day and perpetuate the same crime.
Last year to be precise, when the offices of the CEO of the Tamale Teaching Hospital was ransacked by a gang of NPP hotheads, authorities to appease skeptical Tamale residents immediately said the leader of the group was going to be taught a lesson. Well, you know what, no action was ever brought against the knucklehead.
Of course, it is preposterous if not absurd to pin the entire rap, complete blame on the young men for the state of affairs. Clearly, they are justifiably agitated at their economic and financial prospects. They have every right under the sun to be contemptuous and disdainful of their elders.
After all, they were promised milk and honey when the party was in the wilderness. However once in power, the NPP has inexplicably turned its back on these young men leaving them frustrated and ever ready to take the law into their hands by beating up on poor civil servants.
Like other Ghanaians, I sympathize deeply with the plight of the young men. That said, it should be pointed out that their modus operandi is off base, legally questionable and awfully wrong, besides being politically dangerous. By their very actions, they are inadvertently casting their party in bad light
These young men apparently have lost sight of the fact that the institutions they constantly visit with mayhem and terror are not exclusively the properties of the ruling NPP. They belong to Ghanaian taxpayers. And more importantly, the civil servants whose resignations the young bucks vociferously demand, are appointees of Ghanaian authorities. The young men did not put them there.
So, it goes without saying that if they have a problem with an appointee, they should do the most democratic of things — sit down with authorities and articulate their grievances. Storming the offices of the National Sports Authority and the Tamale Teaching Hospital to remove alleged corrupt Chief Executives is profoundly myopic cowardly and shameful and has no place in our democratic experiment.
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