Parenting

Parenting

By E. Ofori Akyea

Parenting as I find it in Ghana now makes my head go in a whirl. The need to make money is pushing our need to bring up our children into the background. I did not realize that the situation was that bad until we went to see my mother-in-law who was being treated in a private clinic in Accra. In the same clinic was a desperate sick old man on the next bed.

What we noticed was that every morning about 7 am a man would come in looking harassed and anxious to leave. He did not even ask of the health of the old man and after talking to the young girl staying with the old man he left. He did not ask of the old man’s health or what the doctor said. He was in a hurry to go to open his store so that he would not lose any clients. The old man was an irritant that was upsetting his rhythm of life.

The poor old man was unable to take care of himself. The son had engaged an illiterate girl of about 12 years old to take care of his father. The young girl there was not trained to look after people of certain age. She was bewildered in the clinic and she did not have the aptitude to do the kind of job that she had been put up to do. She could not deal with the situation. The son, a businessman, saw his father standing in his way of making more money.

The sister in charge of the ward on the next day told my wife, who was with her mother most of the time, that she did not seem to live in Ghana as she was almost always in the clinic attending to the needs of her mother. She added that people were becoming more and more self centred that the needs of siblings and parents are taking a back seat. The driving force has become the need to make as much money as possible in the shortest time.

Young people do not hesitate to seek the easiest way out of their perceived predicament. Anything but honest hard work will do. Thus entrusting one’s life to a human trafficker to get you to Europe is better than plodding in some work that will give you peace and a comfortable retirement. The experience in a leaky boat that may send you straight to heaven or into the hands of the police or people that do not like the look of your face do not deter them to undertake these dangerous journeys.

I begin to see these days in the papers more and more pictures of young men and women who are wanted by the police for defrauding their employers of large sums of monies entrusted into their care. Also younger and younger girls are bringing babies into the world. For me it is a situation in which children are bringing children into the world and they know next to nothing about mothering and much less about parenting.

The same rootlessness and thought that the other side of the garden is greener is driving a lot of young people into becoming “mules” that carry drugs in and on their bodies to Europe and America. Many young, as well as not so young, Ghanaians are languishing in jails in Asia, and in other parts of the world. Not a few have died in the process. The situation is serious on the human side. In geopolitical terms the reputation of our country has taken some battering. Our country is being labelled as a transit point for drugs on their way to Europe and North America from South America.

All these things are happening when we have a resurgence of people, especially the younger ones, who continually seem to be born again. Powerful prophets and a motley group of religious leaders have specialized in praying for people to get visas. These holy men and women seem to have been given a special power to influence the issuance of visas from whatever embassy. They are able to control the minds of the visa issuing officers to change a rejection into a positive result.

It is these types who rule the hearts and minds of our young people. Parents should have been in charge to direct the lives of their children but they have abandoned their parental role to other agencies. Parents are ready to accept money and other things from their children without questioning the source of those things.

A mother was in the house when her 18 year old arrived in someone’s car. They began unloading bunches of plantain, some cassava, ripe palm nuts and an assortment of meats and fish. The mother without asking the girl of her whereabouts for the past four days helped carry the foodstuffs into the house. The man in whose car she came, and was incidentally the head of a Training Institution in a nearby town, was never introduced.

When the car left the mother proceeded to prepare a sumptuous meal for everyone with some of the produce that had just been brought from God knows where. About six months later the girl was found to be pregnant. When she was asked who was the man responsible for her pregnancy she named four men including the Principal.

The mother and two uncles went into a conclave to determine what to do. They agreed to award the pregnancy to the son of one of the most distinguished families in the area. The youngman, when he was confronted with the fact, denied vehemently. He had gone to bed only once with the girl and it was only for a short time too.

No one from the girl’s family would hear of this excuse. He was given a spoon to scoop up his part of the pregnancy. He was thus pressured to become the “father” of a child that may or may not be his own.

I see the breakdown of the extended family system contributing to the present chaos. It used to be that young people would be sent to stay with aunties and uncles. They had as much authority as the real parents would have over the child. With time the dynamics of society has changed and parents are obliged to take care of their children. Aunties and uncles have their own children to take care of.

There used to be those cultures in our country that inheritance passed through the mother. Thus one inherited the uncle’s property. The man’s own children inherited their uncle’s property on his death. There was, and still is, the situation where the layabout nephews of a man just hung around to pounce on the property of their uncle and driving the children away when the man dies. I have been witness to situations where the nephews and family members have come to drive the wife and the children away and take over the property.

Additional complications come when there is intermarriage with those ethnic groups that inheritance passes to children of the real father. Wives and husbands adopted various strategies to protect the rights of their children. The passage of the PNDC Law on inheritance has also helped to stabilize the situation which is still evolving. One continues to hear of incidents of family members descending on widows and their children to seize property and turn the poor family into becoming destitute.

Those in charge of our country have not and are not tackling the process of social engineering that would transform our country into the desirable place that we all wish it to be. It is, therefore, not surprising that our young people are caught in a Catch 22 situation. The education they receive is deficient. They can neither write nor write English properly. They speak their mother tongue badly that is if they do speak it at all. Those who read the mother tongue are tending to become a rare breed.

Major culprits of the paucity of knowledge of our mother tongue are the new FM stations. When one hears them talk one is not sure if you are listening to your language or Esperanto. Many years ago Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, a Russian Physician in 1887 invented a European based artificial universal language which he called Esperanto Sentences laced with liberal doses of English become their stock in trade. My own view is that in terms of programming and the promotion of the mother tongue the FM stations are turning large parts of Ghana into illiterates without any pride in their language and in its development. In this the Akan stations are the guilty party.