Ever since I returned from my voyages on the sea, my ears and eyes have known no peace. 

What intrigues and interests me most is the zeal with which many fishermen, far more experienced and eminent than I, are speaking passionately about the ambitions of some eminent, accomplished and ‘successful’ persons who desire to go to Parliament.

I concede the persons my colleague fishermen are celebrating and partying about are persons with mouthwatering credentials who equally qualify to sit on the nicely-imported Chinese Chairs of Ghana’s parliament.

So, I took to social media one evening after mending my nets and what I discovered was like an adversarial kind of court system with no judge to listen to the diverse arguments to enable him make valid deductions and subsequent ruling thereof. 

The ‘4th world war’ had already started there!  Opinions were sharply divided.  People were busily 'pissing in' and pissing out about neutrality, journalism and politics. How interesting these discussions were! In the midst of that, I entered Edwinonology’s Lab where I discovered that there are actually two Ghanaians who can only make babies but mustn’t have sex. Interesting, isn’t it?

Well, I suddenly remembered that as a fisherman, my moral duty, as a citizen of this country, is to hold leadership accountable — and no one is beyond critique. 

I felt failure to critique leadership in this country is far more than a lively fun opinion on a social media platform.

Many of the likes that we speak passionately about have been in Parliament and have held other leadership positions in politics but do we get value for the effort we put in, in electing them?

We speak passionately about corruption every minute of the hour but what we fail to see is that corruption is not only about stealing funds.

It is also about putting bad people in prime positions. People who have neither the passion (sincerity) nor the qualification (skills) to do the job. Imagine, someone who has been nominated to be a deputy minister of my Ghana and with a little dribble, the person boldly tells you in the face that “I do not know anything about this job you guys are offering me. Just give me the job and I will go and learn how it is done.”

I burst into flames of laughter upon hearing this and kept quiet because, as a fisherman who has a little schooling, my work experience starts right from the dining hall as the Dining Hall Prefect.

This form of corruption is fast crippling Ghana's development.

This notwithstanding, there might be some people who are in Ghana’s Parliament who even concede privately that they are not cut-out for the positions they hold,  you equally find professors, doctors of all kinds, communication experts, astute business persons, teachers, lawyers and other people whose credentials and descriptions are like the people who are desirous of going to parliament now.

Folks, corruption is worse than murder. It kills more than warfare; it condemns millions of people over so many generations to die of curable diseases.

Leadership should never be according to who shouts the loudest, concocts, or who can make the best speeches. In my entire life as a fisherman, I have learnt meticulously that real leaders do not prey and play to the passions and prejudices of the people they serve, but in Ghana, it is the order of the day.

The politicians have stringently adopted the dictum espoused by Chinua Achebe in “Things Fall Apart”  that once the hunters have learnt to shoot without missing, the birds have also learnt to fly without perching. It is called the colonization of the mind.

These politicians are more than aware that we can accept tee-shirts and a few coins to sell our conscience to them to subdue us to perform comedies of errors when they are elected and thus have resorted to inflicting pain and visiting us with shabby performances! Well, they know they can have the last laugh even after oppressing us.

Before these people get to parliament, they drum into our heads that  they want to serve their people even though they know that it is not only by going to parliament that they can serve their country. Fair enough! They get there and cry wearily that they are poorly paid whereas, what they cry about is actually ten times the salary that they used to receive before going to parliament.

They are given huge monies for rent; loans for purchasing vehicles and other goodies they all concur to bestow on themselves.  Who sent them there in the first place?  Did they decide to go to parliament under duress?

Day in and day out, it is announced that "Mr. so and so was a good leader, he built Roads." But that is what they are supposed to do. Why are we so happy with such low demands on leadership? It is like praising a baker for making bread. But how good was the bread?  Did he make one loaf of bread a year? Did he pocket all the flour?

Why do our leaders (in all areas) fail us? Because there are no consequences for failure in this country! So a talk shop smooth talker can get up and shout out all kinds of beautiful rhetoric, after he gets his thunderous applause and steps down off the podium, what systems or institutions exist to hold that person accountable to those words? Where is the peer review or monitor that tracks these words into actions? Do they get punished for the atrocious things they do against us?

Well, as a fisherman, I know common sense dictates looking both ways before crossing a street or risk being hit by a truck. I earnestly pray, we look at the ways in which we select our leaders.

The writer, Richard Kwadwo Nyarko, is a multimedia journalist. His email is quajo2009@gmail.com.