Coming in today, as the perhaps 6th speaker in this remarkable lineup, I must say that I feel very much like the 5^th wife of King Henry the VIII.

In that, I know what is expected of me, but I am not sure how to do it any differently. But I assure you, just like Henry the VIII said to each of his wives, “I shall not keep you long”.

I must warn you though that my intervention today is likely going to be rumbly. So, I hope you come to it expecting neither structure nor form.

I intended it as a poem rather than a policy document. A poem about resilience and the promise of a New Ghana. In that respect, I suspect that my intervention is likely to be quite different in tone from any other thing you will hear today.

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8 months ago, I was a different person. I was preoccupied with different interests, mainly the philosophy of law and cognitive psychology. I was a person convinced like many of my generation that our democracy had not only failed but was irremediably broken.

We knew it needed fixing, that much we were certain of. Except, between us, we understood intuitively that it was impossible to fix. And even if it wasn’t, our politics will not allow it.

It was too vicious. Innocent lives had been lost in the project to fix Ghana; many had been maimed, and communities left fractured.

In many regards, those lost and broken lives served as a cautionary tale for why we citizens, or perhaps more accurately, subjects, needed to remain pliant and toe the line. We knew to stay away from any ambitious projects of imagining or pursuing a different vision for our society.

Our parents raised us to be afraid of dreaming different; they made no virtue of bold defiance against a political system that had impoverished them and us. My generation was raised to give up.

The Price of our democracy is that it killed our imagination; it undermined our self-worth; and made us distrust the legitimacy of our dreams.

There is no denying that before #FixTheCountry, I too enjoyed the benefit of my relative anonymity. I was known only to those who knew me; and those who knew me, knew me well. I was hardly the object of public controversy, and Ghana’s broken politics served only as a periodic distraction from a life I had a better grasp on.

It was both peaceful and valued. It was a life that took me to working in the biggest law and policy firm in Washington DC, in close proximity with several officials who had served high-level roles in the Clinton and Obama administrations, including Obama’s former Attorney General (Eric Holder); to the International Court of Justice and to the Legal Office of the United Nations. Nothing was missing.

And yet something was if that makes sense.

#FixTheCountry deprived me of my anonymity and thrust me, and perhaps the entire nation into a conversation that we can agree came at a time we had not chosen. And yet it came too late. It was disruptive to my life and those of my fellow activists, and to our professional engagements. At the time, we did not fully understand what we were signing up for.

#FixTheCountry has aged me and the numerous others who volunteered to take up this charge, twice as fast.

Yet We took the blows and stood steadfast.

When Macho Kaaka died, something died in me and other #FixTheCountry activists that day, and with him. We lost the desire to apologize for our advocacy as well as the self-preservation instinct that thrives on stroking the egos of a political class that has taken this country hostage and is actively killing us; both literally and figuratively.

When I set out to think through what I will say today, I had contemplated talking to you about “7 Reasons why I think #FixTheCountry will Fail”. I had given a talk along similar lines to the group “Socialist Solidarity Ghana” when they had invited me to speak on “Social Justice, Youth Activism and Democracy”.

It seemed like an opportunity to refine my thoughts better on the subject and continue to tease out some of the dangers that lurk and continue to test #FixTheCountry’s resilience as a vehicle for mobilizing and organising working-class people to take charge of our democracy.

Somehow, midway, I decided to swap my pessimism for Candour.

So, hear this and hear me well.

#FixTheCountry is the bravest and boldest thing that has happened to our democracy in a very long time. It is the sum of our aspirations and evidence of our resilience as a people. Though we are beaten, we will not give up. It is a reminder that the moral arc of our nation’s conscience, however long it takes, will eventually bend towards freedom and justice. That no matter how long it takes, the people of Ghana will triumph.

Tomorrow’s generation will look back to these moments and say that their parents did this! And boy did we make them proud. And they will feel a sense of pride that emboldens them to fight more and even more bravely. 

When the story of #FixTheCountry is told, it will be of a generation that decided to fight against all odds. Even as the power of the State has become so corrupted ……… as to hunt us; to dismiss us from our jobs; to threaten our livelihoods; conduct illegal surveillance on us, and to shoot innocent civilians in their own communities. Even when the Courts and the judicial process were weaponized to fight our quest for freedom, we stood tall.

Ours is a story of a thousand heartbeats linked together by a desire for change; and a belief in the course of righteousness. When we sang that God should make us bold to defend our nation and the cause of freedom and of right; when nursery children still studying under trees and in dilapidated classrooms many years after our independence, sing the same songs; #FixTheCountry is what they sing of. When we sang that God makes us cherish fearless honesty, and help us to resist oppressor's rule, #FixTheCountry was the courage we sang for; the fearless honesty we yearned for.

Can We then afford for #FixTheCountry to Fail?

This is a call to duty for all of us to shed the shyness and timidity of a generation past. For if we are to reform our democracy, we as citizens must show up. We must shut our ears to those whose stock in trade is to weaponize fear; partisanship and ethnicity to derail our project.

The youth and civic-minded people of this country must understand that time alone will not fix Ghana. Hoping that the benefit of time alone will improve governance in this country is to fail to learn from history. We can no longer afford to give time.

The people of Haiti had the same expectations of time when they became independent in 1804. Today they are one of the poorest countries in the world. Liberia proclaimed its independence in 1848, today they are still one of the world’s poorest.

My Fellow subjects, Let us not underestimate the destructive power of generational greed and horrible ideas; as well as its ability to be twice as resilient as our quest for freedom.

Bad ideas form political parties too. They mobilize people too. They compete for elections too. They form younger cadres, name them TEIN or TESCON and siphon out the soul of young people. They promise them that the public kitty will be theirs for the taking if they are patient and loyal. If they defend corruption with their might if they insult journalists and abuse activists. The forces that hold this country back are so entrenched in everyday processes, that we have become blind to them.

To reform our democracy, good people must no longer sit aloof; we cannot leave the burden of activism to a few individuals. Many young people have put their lives on the line, by volunteering their time and energy in the hopes of drawing attention to the fierce urgency of our poverty and those of our parents.

We have pointed out the deceptions of “this dictatorship of no alternatives” that is hidden under the cloak of a superficial multi-partisan democracy. Party politics has become a vehicle for rot, corruption, arrogance and abuse of power. Our hospitals and our roads are killing us; our school systems are preparing us to fail. Nothing works in this country.

To get justice, you must pay for the police to come to your house and investigate the crime, you must go and find the suspect yourself and pay for them to come and effect an arrest; you must pay for them to bring a suspect to court, you must pay for them to show up. This is not a democracy. This is a system that works for only those who are rich and notorious.

Half of this country lives in kiosks and dilapidated buildings. There are more Ghanaians living below the poverty line than they did when we sacked the colonial oppressors.

As Selikem Timothy Donkor just tweeted. “Governance is nothing if the People are suffering”

We are a society without a vision. We are led by a political class that acts like Priests who have lost their faith but have continued to keep their jobs. We are a visionless society led by Quacks who are not honest enough to admit they are in over their heads.

Even if this Country were to break down completely, our political class will steal the doorknob, on the way out.

This is the legacy of the Fourth Republic. This is a legacy of a 65-year-old Nation. Can We then afford for #FixTheCountry to Fail?

We were lulled into a false sense of security, and so we forgot to be vigilant. We allowed in a new set of oppressors and a system of government based on structural inequity. We have created a political class that is greedy, vicious, and unrepentant.

They then seized the opportunity to impoverish us. And when we demand more, they kill us. They kill us during the elections and say we are armed robbers who are deserving of our death. They kill us at Ejura and turn around and tell us, we shot ourselves.

If our deaths are meaningless to them, how much more our hunger and our poverty? (2x)

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In the early beginnings of #FixTheCountry, I told you that we are in a generational fight for the very soul of this nation. This is as true today as it was true then. If we claim as citizens that our democracy gives us power; then we must be prepared to show that power. To trigger reform and the brave democratic changes that this country urgently needs, we cannot leave our destiny in the hands of a political class that has shown us that we matter little to them.

We must mute the conservatives, who tell us that this is as good as it gets. For what does the rich and comfortable understand about the rage of a hungry generation.

If we want to understand and deploy the real enormity of the power, we as a people hold, then we need to stand together. I am not talking about “kokromoti” power. That’s a myth. I am talking about real power that only united action confers.

We need to sign up to show up. If we truly held power, we won’t be sitting aloof expecting the same political class to initiate and design for us a different social contract, a new constitution that holds them to better account and restricts them even tighter than we are able to currently.

If we truly held power, we would come together, mobilize together, work together, fundraise together, fight together. We will support #FixTheCountry and form other civic initiatives like it. We will organize one of the biggest political protests this country has ever seen to demand a new Democracy. Just like how our compatriots in Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia did it.

Except we will do it better. For we are Ghanaians after all. Our soul yearns for excellence. And we can achieve it.

That is how other societies have progressed. That is how the French Revolution against the oppressive monarchy happened. This is what happened in England.

Citizens showed up to demand a new politics.

So, I ask you today, will you stand with #FixTheCountry, or will you allow it to fail through your apathy and continuing disinterest.

Because that’s the message your silence sends. That #FixTheCountry must fail.

Thank you.