The Managing
Editor of the Insight newspaper, Mr Kwesi Pratt Jnr, has attributed the
increasing unpatriotic nature of the Ghanaian youth to the bad leadership and
the quest for monetary gains against service to humanity. “Patriotism does not
just arise, people do not just become patriotic, people are conditioned to
become patriotic and one of such conditions is the quality of the leadership.
If patriotism is scarce in Ghana, it means that good leadership is also
scarce”, he said. Mr Pratt was speaking at the Southern Edition of the National
Youth Patriotism Lectures organised by the National Youth Authority (NYA), with
sponsorship from the Daily Graphic at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science
and Technology as part of activities to diagnose the recent unpatriotic nature
of the youth and find ways to whip up their love for the nation.
Speaking on
the topic, “The Death of Patriotism in Ghana, What went wrong and what needs
changing -A Journalist’s Perspective”, Mr Pratt used the failure of the
national team, the Black Stars in Brazil as an example. He said the Greek team
donated their appearance fees and bonuses for the building of playing grounds
in their country while their Algerian counterparts dashed out their money to
the refugees in Gaza. But the Black Stars players insisted on their money and the government had to charter a plane and
send the money before they would play the match. He said reports also indicated
that the Black Stars players, who were going to play football matches, were
flown in third class but asked if the
players would have complained if all the officials were in third class. “If
anybody were to be in the first class it should not have been the officials but
the players who were going to play the football”, Mr Pratt said and added that
he did not believe that the youth of Ghana were different from those in any
other country but it was the leadership that had conditioned the Ghanaian youth
to be unpatriotic.
Purpose of
education
He explained
that currently parents and others advise children to learn hard and struggle to
climb the academic ladder so that they would be able to amass wealth, receive
fat salaries, build mansions, and drive the best of vehicles. He wondered why
Ghanaians would be surprised at the nature of the youth when they were
unpatriotic after attaining academic laurels, forgetting that the intuition was
for them to be rich and enjoy life after study.
But
according to Mr Pratt, this was not the original purpose of education, the real
purpose of education “is to acquire knowledge and to use that knowledge to
improve the quality of the society. The money must be a by-product”. He said in
other societies, children were taught to acquire educational knowledge to
become medical doctors to cure diseases and bring relief to the suffering
masses, and “that is why a community in Latin America when HIV/AIDS became
pandemic, doctors started injecting themselves with the virus so that they
could study themselves and find cure for the diseases. They were ready to die
so that they can conquer AIDS”.
Stone age
conditions
Mr Pratt
said years after independence and claim of development, some Ghanaians were
still living in conditions akin to that of the stone age, and mentioned that
such people were even living just three kilometres from the national capital,
Accra. He said most of such people had resorted to the use of crude method for
their daily life not because they fancies such things but because they walked
long kilometres to the nearest health facilities for cure, had no access to
potable water, they had never seen blender in their life and walked barefooted,
live in mud houses with thatched roofs.
Source: Daily Graphic
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