The tragedy of our times

A NOISY self-proclaimed evangelist armed himself with all sorts of offensive weapons, stormed a radio station and in a savage mood, vandalised the place. His beef was that the station was holding a discussion in which his name was mentioned in a negative manner. The case went to court and everybody expected a speedy trial to make a strong case that this is not a lawless country where the laws of the jungle prevails. Unfortunately, we have been told that speed is not one of the characteristics of the wheel of justice; which according to the legal brains, grinds slowly. In this case, the wheel was not only grinding slowly, but virtually came to a halt until we started hearing murmurs that there were skirmishes of an out-of-court settlement. The final decision, we are yet to know. About two years or so ago, a prominent school proprietor was caught in the web of defilement when he got a 16-year-old pupil of one of his schools pregnant. The case attracted public attention for obvious reasons. First, a proprietor of a school should be the last person to subvert the future of any of his pupils and second, the man, had a few years before the incident, caught the attention of the president of the republic and had been decorated with a grand medal, apparently, for exceptional public service. We were all put to shame when the charge of forced marriage was dropped and the accused, the victim’s mother and grandmother were discharged. A clear message was sent. A crime is only a crime, when you cannot bargain your way out. The tone has been set and the path has been clearly demarcated, so it went on. A female musician who likes performing semi-nude had the audacity to violently confront a policeman who was doing his official duty and even held his shirt, tearing it in the process. Then, the usual chorus started flowing from the lips of the so-called influential persons of society. The offence or crime was overshadowed by the personality so the court started pandering to whims and caprices of the accused and the law became the victim. In one of such theatrical displays typical of our national tragedy, a court discharged a comedian who had turned himself into a consular officer of the United States of America Embassy in Ghana and took large sums of money from would-be travellers to secure visas for them. We know there is something called the alternative dispute resolution (ADR), which recognises settlement by consensus between feuding parties. But the blatant manner in which the court handled a purely criminal case in ADR fashion makes mockery of the law. As if the state had not suffered enough, the judge, in a jocular manner told the accused to go and make a movie about how he duped people but succeeded in walking out of a courtroom a free person. In a case which is a subject of a police investigation, a woman has been charged for illegal trafficking of Ghanaians, mostly women, to the Gulf States who end up doing menial jobs and forced prostitution. Even before the suspect could be sent to court, she is all over the place hopping from one radio station to the other and pouring invectives on journalists who only did their work by reporting the arrest from police sources. This is where we have come to, where people suspected of crimes could go outside the judicial system and with impunity and challenge the law enforcement agencies for daring to arrest and prosecute them. They go further to challenge the media for doing their work of informing the public of what is happening or taking place around them. This time, it is not our laws that have been made mockery of and turned into paper tigers, but the institutional indiscipline that has engulfed the country. The best place to see this in full evidence is on the roads. There are more unlicensed motor-bikes on the roads than the registered ones and these are not in any remote village outside the glare of the police but in Accra, the national capital. The carnage on the roads continue unabated and instead of taking drastic and decisive action, we prefer to pontificate and sermonise. We have become used to the lawlessness in the construction, especially the building sector and the filth that has engulfed our towns and cities is a product of lawlessness and indiscipline. Noise from churches and entertainment spots have polluted the atmosphere in residential areas, but who cares? After all, we are Ghanaians who care very little for the law. We always credit ourselves to be peaceful and law-abiding. Maybe, it is taking us too long to realise that we are getting very close to the outskirts of the jungle and unless our state institutions backup to and inject sanity into the system and unless we give the law the freedom to operate, we shall wake up one day to realise we are deep in the jungle. fokofi@yahoo.co.uk kofiakordorblogspot.com