CONSCIENCE

Conscience

W

ho tells you that what you are doing is either right wrong in the absence of your friends, family or any person? Consider you stealing a friend’s money and spending it. After you got home you felt sorry for what you have done to your friend. What or who made you feel bad?  It is the friend God has given to us to guide us in all our dealings. His name is “conscience”.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking as defined by H.L Mencken. This is a friend we can’t see but follow as where ever we go and tries to direct us in all things that we do. Do we really obey this friend of ours?

In recent times, Ghana’s sanitation has been a problem and headache to all indigenes of the country. It is said that a healthy mind is a sound mind. Our streets, homes, schools and drains have been littered with filth ranging from sachet wrappers, papers, human excreta, polythene bags and waste from factories. The question I ask is, if we have conscience would all these be happening? Everybody knows the right thing to do in terms of keeping the environment clean but wouldn’t do it to the extent that even students who are taught to keep their surroundings clean are also indulged in littering and polluting the environment. Cholera has taken hostage of most communities in Accra and other parts of the country but we still pollute our environment. Where is our conscience?

All our problems are linked to our leaders. When the word “leader” is mentioned in Ghana, what come into mind are our political leaders. Hmmmmmm!!!!! Is it really true? Some political leaders such as ministers, members of parliament have failed or are failing to fulfill their promises to the people. Is a leader expected to live lavishly at the expense of his followers? Sugar-coated campaign promises are made to the people but at the end none is fulfilled. Constituents undergo pain because there are no good roads, portable drinking water, health centers to cater for them when they fall sick and also good schools to attend.

Can this conscience who is our companion be killed? If yes, then I think some of our political leaders have killed their God-given aide.

Do not forget that, you the reader are also a leader somewhere or somehow in the society you find yourself. It could be your school, class, your home, among your peers or even the church or mosque.

Do you allow your conscience to be the final judge in all decision making? If not, then take this advice from Mohandas Gandhi who said “there is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts.” Most of us have chained ourselves as a result of the behaviors or actions that we take and therefore harbored a hidden enemy which is our guilty conscience.

The greater population of Ghanaians is economically handicapped because of low standards of living in the country. How well do we manage our finance as leaders of various institutions and workers of these institutions in the country? Do we work diligently for the betterment of the country or haphazardly do the work because the institution belongs to the state?

We can only free ourselves from the internal or hidden enemy if we work and reap from where we have sown, and also work with all enthusiasm, diligence and faithfulness.

Should we continue raining blames on our leaders for our problems? We as followers also have a role to play to enhance nation building. Our problems as a nation cannot be solved by individuals but only through a collective responsibility right from the president to the child of school going age.

Let’s remember that all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. (Thomas Jefferson). Most of us have kept silent because we presume that the nation is not ours. It is ours! and would be able to transform this nation if we don’t seek parochial interests. Let us speak out! Let us correct people who are misleading us. Let us not kill our conscience but always make sure that Albert Einstein’s quote which says that, “never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it” depart from our mouth but meditate on it day and night.