#FixTheCountryNow – A great deal of anger around us – Hon. Ablakwa

The leadership response must not be to launch cowardly attacks on them with #FixYourselfFirst and #FixYourAttitude campaigns which can only be tantamount to dereliction.

If there are challenges with attitudes and mindsets in our country then leaders must be courageous to take responsibility for as our elders say, the fish rots from the head. As political leaders, let’s set the right examples and create the appropriate ecosystem and citizens will gladly follow. Leadership is cause, everything else is effect.

The real danger lies in underestimating the power of the youth and contemptuously ignoring the grievances of the #FixTheCountry/#FixTheCountryNow movement. Recent history must be our guide – from the Iranian youth revolution that overthrew the Shah in 1979, the youth inspired Tianaman Square protests of 1989 that reformed China, the 2010 Arab Spring triggered by the self-immolation of 26-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi and our own June 4, 1979 revolution led by young soldiers and backed by university students should remind us to take the current widespread discontent more seriously. Nobody wants a cataclysmic explosion so leadership must rise and act fast.

This is not the time for the usual petty politicking and sickening insulting game of blaming the previous administration. The current crisis demands that all political leaders, particularly, those in power and in control of all national resources pay keen attention to the plight of the masses. Let the youth be made to understand that they are being listened to and that #FixTheCountry/#FixTheCountryNow is receiving real attention with specific measurable assurances.

Any government who toys with a spontaneous organic movement that has in few days garnered over 350k tweets does so at their own peril. Mind you the nature of spontaneous organic movements in cyberspace are that repressive regimes find it extremely difficult to identify a few leaders for either bribery, intimidation or elimination. The Akufo-Addo administration has therefore only one option: urgently address the legitimate demands of the agitators. In any case, the youth aren’t asking for anything new which the President hasn’t already spoken eloquently about his ability to deliver in a few months if elected. Remember the President in 2016 asked for only 18 months to transform this country.

This period requires a sober and deep reflection on all that is wrong with this 29-year-old fourth republican democratic dispensation and why so many are beginning to feel it has woefully failed to meet the lofty expectations of the 1990s. Without hesitation and equivocation, the time for fundamental governance reforms anchored on a new Constitution and a potently more credible Parliament is needed now more than ever.

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The political class across the entire political spectrum must wake up to this existential threat. Don’t you dare mess with an angry youthful army who genuinely believe the system is rigged. It was Marx and Engels who warned: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Let us all agree too much has gone wrong that must be properly and permanently fixed now or else that which is wrong shall in no time devour us sparing none. The youth will triumph; they have a world to win!