One of the easiest things to do is to blame others for your shortfall. It is very hard to see yourself as part of the problem.

I ran into prefect colleagues of mine feasting over a bowl of rice and chicken and I joined in without questioning the source of the meal.

I had been travelling for over five hours and was very hungry. Having satisfied my immediate need, I came to my senses and quizzed: “Charlie wey home cho this? ...edeybeeewaaaaa!” and my colleagues laughingly and gurglingly responded, “eno be home choebi we wey we cook am?”, and unconvinced with a puzzled look, I asked again, "how you fit cook am"?

Apparently my fellow prefects had hunted down a house master’s fowl and prepared chicken stew of it with rice.

When school resumed, I was invited along with the Head Boy, who is also party to the fowl-stealing-and-feasting episode, to the Assistant Headmaster's office.

Our first assignment was to investigate a “missing fowl” as there was an evidence of chicken feathers found at the boys dump site and they match the description of the missing fowl, the same fowl we feasted on.

In terms of how the investigations ended, your guess is as good as mine.

In the Bible a story was told of two brothers Esau and  Jacob. One day, Esau came home famished, demanding to be fed, and agreed to give Jacob his inheritance rights in exchange for a bowl of soup.

You can guess how this story ended.

Our immediate needs always blind us from seeing into the future. We always want quick fixes to problems and don't really take time to think hard about the ramifications of our actions.

A quick fix to problems leads us into accepting anything without questioning. Our politicians are already compromised before they even step into office because during campaign they sound like playboys trying to woo girls - doing everything in their power to excite, and persuade without critically examining the practicability of their statements.

As in the high school story I ate before questioning the source; in the story of Jacob and Esau, Jacobs’s objective was to satisfy an immediate need without thinking he will be losing his life inheritance by one single action.

The politician’s immediate need when they step into office is not the needs of the people who voted them into power - not even their family and close associate - but rather the need of those who sponsored their campaign and political activities prior to the assumption to office.

The national needs are always secondary not a priority. The strategy is simple, Government should “necessarily” award and pay these companies whether they have worked or not and if it is detected (as in the “chicken case”), there will be an investigation to do “nothing”.

This hypothesis explains why the current government amidst of huge indebtedness, scontinue to make many avoidable mistakes resulting in agitations from its citizenry.

Unless we begun to critically investigate the relationship and extent of companies, institutions and individual involvement in funding political parties, we will go nowhere with the fight against corruption.

The issues of missing cocaine, judgement debt, Gyeeda, Subah Info System etc will never leave the shores of our body politics.

We should not be like ostriches, burying our heads in the sand and hoping we are totally covered, in the face of all these revelations it is important to begin asking and demanding accountability from our leaders.

Enough with the politicking, it is obvious now that there isn’t much distinction between the core functioning and operations of government no matter the party in power.

It is important as a country to step back and critically examine the entire democratic value chain systems, re-model and re-adapt to systems that best reflects our socio-economic and cultural circumstance instead of the so-called hybrid multi-party democracy - a combination of the American-Presidential model and British-Parliamentary model - which is so foreign and alien to our circumstance.

[The writer is a graduate student (BA Socio & Pol Sc. MBA/MIS, MSc CCSD) at the University of Ghana, Legon].