The �3,000 Visa Deposit � No Tears For Ghanaians

�That is why today we (Africans) find it convenient not only to listen to funk, rap and all kinds of foreign music but also in order to enjoy it you have to buy the jeans that goes with it and a kind of Coca-Cola in your right hand and beef burger in your left hand.� �Faisal Helwani Credible reports indicate that the British government has slapped a fee of �3,000 pounds to be paid as deposit by people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Ghana who wish to travel to United Kingdom (UK) starting from November this year. The affected travelers will get their money back when they leave the UK after their visit. The scheme is meant to end the abuse of the visa scheme. It is a fact that many people, especially from the developing countries, enter the developed countries on the pretence of visitors� visa and end up overstaying their welcome. They end up as economic refugees. For some of us who watch events from the touchline, the announcement did not come to us a surprise. Indeed it was long overdue. That was why I really became disturbed at the hostilities with which it was received in this country, especially by our leaders in government, whose acts of omission and commission contributed to the end result of the British announcement. The reason is very simple. On the dawn of independence from the colonial masters, the �liberated� citizens were promised paradise on earth by the people who assumed power and leadership role as �liberators� who incidentally turned out to be a bunch of armed brigades whose stock in trade was to create, lot and share the resources meant for the common good of all the people. This left the ordinary citizens like fish out of water, palpitating for fresh air in a hostile environment which could not support it. Today, most people in the �liberated territories� behave like poultry chicken released from captivity in the centre of a market place. They still do not believe that they are free to take up their freedom and challenge their greedy corrupt and fraudulent leaders. The suffering masses in the developing countries have been subjugated for so long they have lost their spirit to fight the corrupt leadership which they have fostered on themselves. Most of them, highly enlightened and educated at great expense with state funds, who should be speaking up against the great injustice going on, rather keep quiet because they are so comfortable with the existing situation. They have simply lost any count of the future. Ironically, most of the suffering masses, on the other hand, have taken their underprivileged status as a matter of course and a natural part of life. They have come to accept the unacceptable fact that leaders go and leaders come and that all the leaders exhibit the greedy gluttony of the African pig let loose in a filthy smelling gutter infested with rotten garbage. This explains what is happening in Ghana today where the people have allowed a bunch of idiotic vagabonds to create a colony of greedy bastards whose vision, mission and objectives are to create, loot and share the nation�s resource to occupy the state house and manage their lives for them without any protest. Yet in this country of 25 million people, many have had the best education imaginable. Ghana is the first African country to achieve independence from colonial rule, the first African country to have her citizen elected as the President of the United Nations and the first African country, whose citizen served two full terms a Secretary-General of the United Nations. Ghana today is a country, which by default, has a former vice-chancellor as Minister of Education. And yet when the time came for the Ministry of Education to meet the vice-chancellors of this country to address their problems, the lot fell on a character whose record and pronouncement in office would have qualified him as a lonely waif in the advanced civilized democracies. And yet the coterie of learned academicians with the best education a nation can offer her citizens and placed in position of trust to manage the topmost educational institutions in the country subjugated their honoured and treasured positions, which would have been a taboo in the civilized world. Are we teaching the children in our care that the education we have had cannot make us brave enough and open our minds to speak up against injustice in society and the uncouth corrupt behaviour of our leaders The people of this country have reduced themselves to hen-pecked husbands when it comes to saying NO to those in authority. It takes one �mad� fellow in the person of Hon. Martin Alamisi Benz Kaiser Amidu, to take on the mighty force of the evil empire of the NDC in a fight of David and Goliath magnitude. Some idiotic nation wreckers and looters in the society have the title �Honourable� attached to their names in the media simply because they are occupying the positions of minsters of state and parliamentary seats and yet I have not noticed a single media house which has attached �Honourable� to the name �Martin Alamisi Benz Kaiser Amidu� since he started his crusade. Long ago, I read a story book: �THE SLAVE SHIP�. The book narrates in vivid terms how our ancestors were forceful sold into slavery by our own kith and kin. There was this black slave dealer who acted as the agent between the black slave raiders and the white foreign merchants. He always negotiated the commercial contract, and collected his cut with much buffoonery gluttony. Then during one such expedition, when the last slave had been pushed down the ships belly, the white slave merchant looked on this heavy well-fed buffoon of black slave agent and decided that he could also be a good slave. The white slave merchant ordered that the black slave agent be pushed down the ship�s belly to join his fellow citizens and the order was immediately carried out. Yesterday our ancestors were forced to board the slave ship. Today agile young strong able-bodied citizens are prepared to board the slave ship on their own voluntary volition. They do not see any future in their own country. Ghanaians are prepared to wait for three months to attend visa interview at the USA embassy and sit in the rain waiting to be called. Ghanaians are prepared to sell their properties, including landed ones, to acquire passports and visas. Ghanaians are prepared to do any job in the Whiteman�s land to escape the state of hopelessness in their own country. Educated Ghanaians send their pregnant wives to give birth in Europe and the Americans so that the newly born children will acquire foreign nationality. Educated Ghanaians still give foreign names to their newly born children. We have accepted our faith that we are inferior to the white colonial masters. Our leaders have eaten off the fresh from the juicy succulent freshly meat and left us with the hard, impregnable and useless bone. They then tour the Whiteman�s world for grant, aid and loans to build roads and hospitals. And yet we are all afraid, unwilling, uncaring to remove the converted national throne from under their bulging and over inflated testicles. We give church platforms, media time and other important platforms to these greedy bastards to continue not only to insult the rest of us with devilish, satanic, ungodly sermons but also provide defence for their unholy corrupt industry of creating, looting and sharing of the national assets. Let us listen to Olumayoya Okediran, Vice President (Strategy) of Students Organisation at the University of Abeokuta, Nigeria: �How does the government hope to solve our problems by taking money from poor people in rich countries to subsidize rich people in poor countries? � That in fact is a correct description of aid, an opponent to positive marketing, simply put � begging for foreign aid is negative marketing.� Currently, the NPP has taken the course of peace to seek justice at the Supreme Court. Elements within the NDC have been preaching brimstone and fire including civil war should the case go against them. To the nine members of the Supreme Court and in honour of Hon. Martin Amidu, let us all bear in mind the words of Jean Garton, Co-founder and President of Lutherans for Life: �As citizens living under a democratic government, we are free to debate the law, protest the law, and seek to change the law. We are not free to take the law into our own hands to become �justice vigilantes.� Because �our struggle is not against flesh and blood� (Ephesians 6), violence is too weak a weapon against evil. The Word is always more powerful than the sword even when the �sword� is a gun, a bomb or any other lethal weapon.� When our leaders, both elected and appointed, accept the fear of God and start behaving sensibly and start treating the followers justly, there will be no need for any foreign country to put restrictive measures in place to check the influx of other citizens into its own country. When the followers begin to ask for accountability and transparency from their leaders, there will be no need for anybody to seek greener pastures in foreign lands.