TOMORROW WILL REMAIN ELUSIVE TO THE GHANAIAN YOUTH UNDER THIS 1992 CONSTITUTION.

I know the biggest crime is just to throw up your hands and say "This has nothing to do with me, I just want to live as comfortably as I can." ~ Ani DiFranco

In the words of the Jewish American Professor, Elie wiesel "there are times when we may be powerless to prevent injustice but there must never be a time when we fail to protest it". 

I am a man of simple faith. I do not care so much about definitions. When I see that something works I say so, when it does not work I also say so. I stand on the side of truth, although these days, the truth is equally part of the problem of Ghana.

It bleeds me so hollow that the hopeless symptom of apathetic attitude of youths involvement in the affairs of the country that bothers our lives is rather treated with disdain and complacency alibi. Any country whose youths are progressively known to be sashaying on the fading table of acute involvement in its affairs, such a country is best described as a Country with no plans and hope for tomorrow, and same is of Republic of Ghana.

The pride of nations is indeed in the strength of her youth. Instead of nurturing ours and empowering them for productive ventures, we deplete their numbers and strength with constitutional provisions. Ghanaian Youth have come under attacks since 1992, not from some arm bearing miscreants but from the very laws that were supposed to protect us under the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Ghana. Ours is a constitution where youths count for nothing. That is why there is no sense of outrage when the youth of the country is continuously raped and sidelined. Our youths only find value in the hands of our leaders during elections when we are recruited as agents of electoral malpractices and afterwards, we are abandoned to suffer in joblessness.

Suffix it to say that unlike the past where those that are elderly are at the helm of affairs and blames are apportioned to them for consistent occupancy of various positions, especially political appointment, the youths of nowadays have not only ignorantly sold their conscience and tie their fate to the apron string of melancholy but has provided the hammers designed for nailing their ambition as future leaders to the coffin.

We are still on the sidewalk, galloping on a scale of recurrent decimal of hopeless hope. This is an obvious indication that same people who know the innermost genesis about this occurrence are also responsible for the backwardness of the rescue exercise and the constant sabotaging of same.

The destiny of today's youth squarely rest on our hands and our fate of tomorrow is intertwined with our own attitude of obliviousness which has climaxed to the height of Eldorado. In other words, their consistent ‘I don't careerism attitude’ is in direct proportion to their doom. 

Ghanaian youth, like Esau in the Bible, have sold their birthright and destiny for a plate of jollof rice with fried fish (Kpanla). I do not only lament because I am a youth but I weep for the impudence of the youths who has contributed to the mugging of our tomorrow by not just the political leaders and their lunatic advisers but also the constant behavioral dysfunction towards their tomorrow. I then ask: where and how did we find ourselves at this distorted and regrettable juncture?  

Unlike what Professor Wole Soyinka pointed out, the youth of this generation are dead on arrival. Neither our present nor our future speaks volume of our involuntary will of involving in Government activities under the current arrangements and wicked clauses in the Constitution from preamble to schedules. We have been made to succumb to the will of redundant decision and appellation of the rogue elderly in power and thereby allowing our tomorrow to be decided by those who are waiting in the departure lounge and without tomorrow by same constitution.

Events of varied degrees can attest to the fact that at every given moment, the average Ghanaian youth is only concerned with the instant gratification of self-fulfillment without thinking or sampling the weather of tomorrow's occurrence or the aftermath of such lukewarm action in a concave of personal assertion and measurement.   Conceding and seceding the relevance of tomorrow to same set of people whose decisions and involvement in early politics never or did heed little or nothing to the growth of the Country is tantamount to  planting and sowing seeds on a rock and expect to get maximum increase at the harvest period. They walk in haughty strides and flaunt looted monies and encourage the youths to die in their place of some corrupt politicians whose only aim of being in politics is for their own self-s aggrandizement. They gave room to these politicians whose families are only resident in Abroad. The question therefore is; for how long will it take the youths to refocus and redirect their steps into the rightful track?   

Selling your souls to the New Patriotic Party (NPP) or National Democratic Congress (NDC) communicators, rallies and campaigns is not a total assurance or guarantee of your tomorrow. The question should rather be: what structures and qualitative manifestos do these aggrieved political rogues struggling for power have on ground? They made us, the youths to be spectators of their shameful display of inept manifestation of their indoor agreement and urge us to take up arms against their political opponent.  

Even with the present administration of John Mahama, a supposed youth, where is the leverage provided for the youths and job employment that is feasible to all? all I am aware of is the several propaganda in different tabloids.  

Even the office of the National Youth Authority (NSA) and or Youth Enterprise Support (YES or YEA) on job creation headed by Ras Mubarak is nothing short of an office where he gathers his associates and waste the whole day discussing irrelevant issues and gallivanting without positive daily outcome and depart before the closure of the day. Nothing good except the practice of silence and abode for smokers who come there to while away their time has emanated from that office since the inception of its creation.  

It is inexcusable for our political leaders to continue basking in the euphoria of stagnancy of youth’s welfare development because they are surrounded by charlatans and sycophants whose major aim is to continue gathering grains from the National resources even when they don't need it. 

The President, Speaker of Parliament and the Chief Justice  is very much aware of this fact, let no pretense prevail; a practice of sheer wickedness and delusional propensity of a sincere self-participatory lacuna towards the strides of youth development. What a blatant shame!  

We now live in an era where events spread like wild fire and the people jerk up to reaction for just a few minutes after which it will die down like such an incident never took place. If the truth is to be told in all sanctity, the people whom we registered our vacuity to put in political offices and who swore to protect our sovereignty, lives and properties did not only throw our hope into the thin air but has also smirched us on our cheek bone. How can a country whose tomorrow is being tossed like a coin by some miscreants decides to abandon her line of priority and chooses to tow on the tiny lines of personal aggrandizement by few who had been benefitting from the bounty of absolute corruption? I weep for my mother's land. 

We have a full fledge of rogues whose only aim in government is to make the people weep and bath with regrets. A country that has all these as her products has invariably lost her virtues before her foreign counterparts. The President is not left out as he has paid blind attention to the corruption affecting most of his commitment towards the concern of youth participation in politics and development. 

With all these analogies with as many as FIVE provisions in the constitution on ground to inhibit the youth, we need no soothsayers to tell the youths that our present and future as enshrined in our constitution is worth nothing reasonable in guaranteeing the future of Ghanaian youth. The youths have remained at a particular junction of rigmarole and walking round in a circle. The so called corrupt rogues we have as leaders are aware of these facts and rather than postulating avenues of revival, they have embarked on their normal practical theory of 'control response stimuli ', a situation whereby the lives of the youths are made so hard that they have to beg for crumbs from the tables of our corrupt and unreasonable politicians. Where they will remain in a motion mode of classical conditioning without any hope of springing forth out of the circle. 

Our constitution makes us beg for bread and end up becoming perpetual slaves to our dastardly acts of inhumanity because of their inordinate ambition. If this trend continues, it therefore goes to define and assuage the past cries of being the leaders of tomorrow as a poet sang and re-echoed in the dark of unwanted voice bellowing for a reason of attention that is never required.  

Of a truth, Professor Wole Soyinka was right when he said and I quote" the youth of this generation is dead on arrival". 

The bells of political jingles are ringing boisterously on every corner and the youths as usual are the major target of shameful insolence of public show of shame and display of idolatry sagacity. 

We have a full fledge of rogues whose only aim in government is to make the people weep and bath with regrets. A country that has all these as her products will certainly lose her place in the global political market. 

Where do we go from here? Every nooks and crannies of the country is flooded with campaign posters with negotiations going on and the very issue on the tabloid has been left unattended to.  A country filled with acclaimed visionary leaders with no value, no vision and no shame.  

These are what we have been living with and from all indications, all these abnormalities will continue to remain static except the youths rise up and wake up from their slumber and rise to their feet and redirect their destinies by saying no to clauses that prohibit our involvement in decision making of our nation. We must fight the inconsistencies in the constitution in order to liberate the Ghanaian youth.

Per our constitution, we are told it’s our natural and inalienable right to establish a government which shall secure our prosperity, liberty, equality of opportunity and posterity. Can we say we have achieved this as a nation?

How can article 17 (1) say all persons shall be equal before the law , 17 (2) say a person shall not be discriminated against on grounds of gender, race, colour, ethnic origin, religion, creed or social or economic status and conspicuously missing is age?. 

Article 21 clause (3) for instance, bestows on all citizens the right and freedom to join political parties and to participate in political activities subject to such QUALIFICATIONS and laws as are necessary in a free and democratic society and are consistent with this constitution. The question is where would article 17 (1) be?

The most annoying portion of the constitution is the right to vote as enshrined in article 42, where every citizen of eighteen years of age or above and of sound mind has the right to vote and is entitled to be registered as a voter for the purposes of public elections and referenda. How can I vote for, and cannot be voted for? Where is the sense in article 62 (b) which states a person shall not be qualified for election as the President of Ghana unless he has attained the age of forty years? As if, the age forty is magical. I restrained myself to comment on the use of (He) as if it is only men who are born and allowed by law to run to be president. Can you see the deliberate discrimination against us by the framers and users of the constitution? How do I determine a president by voting if I cannot be a president or think like a president? Could this not be the reason why politicians think the nation is made up of short minded voters?

Again article 94 clauses (1a) says a person shall not be qualified to be a member of parliament unless he or she is a citizen of Ghana, and has attained the age of twenty-one years and is a registered voter. For Christ sake, how can persons not qualified to be president by law make laws to be used in administration of a nation? 

It is apparent to conclude that the Republic of Ghana Constitution-1992 is the bane of the progress of Ghanaian youth. And until it is repealed to appreciate the importance of the youth, Ghana will be round aground by clueless grandpas.

Tomorrow will obviously remain elusive to us under this selective constitution if we don’t resist the segregation. We shall continue to be willing tools in the hands of deceitful governments, for there is no future anywhere for us under this constitution. Let’s join hands devoid of political and dialectical boundaries that often put us apart and fight the system to consolidate our constituency.