Sat on his sofa with a sad yet nostalgic smile, Justice Owusu Boamah reminisced of a time where he used to run with friends in deserted meadows, chasing cars and dreams of becoming wealthy politicians. It was still a garden-fresh memory in his mind, crisp like Chin Chin chips, the ones he often bought by the roadside on the way to school.
He said: “One believes in what they see. And on TV, we saw politicians looking beautiful whilst around us we saw only misery. We thought, ‘We want to be that beautiful’.”
Boamah was born in Ghana in 1976 and spent most of his years in the small village of Pankrono. Out of six siblings, he was the first to complete high school and second-last to relocate abroad at 32, saying bye-bye to a life that didn’t satisfy him anymore. Maybe, it never did. Moving abroad led him to an intellectual and political awakening that he never saw coming. But he welcomed it, all of it.
“In Scotland, the citizens have the freedom to vote for who they want,” he commented.
“But in Ghana, people feel forced to vote for a specific political party because of intimidation from others. I want to change the mentality of my countrymen. I want to bring change to the politics there.”
Now the 45-year-old resides in Glasgow and fills the role of national organiser of West of Scotland for the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the ruling government in his motherland. When he is not battling for good policies for his compatriots from miles away, one will find him working as a baker.
He has been asked a few times why he wants to be part of the politics of a country he no longer lives in. He said: “Even my wife told me once, ‘If there is a problem in Africa now, you cannot swim there’.”
“I love the party because the party loves the people,” he retorted at the time.
Wanting to prove how NPP modernised his country, he referenced the Free Senior High School policy that it introduced in 2017. The policy abolished high school tuition fees in the nation. Boamah passionately stated: “This was ground-breaking for us citizens. This is history.”
Indeed, the regular Ghanaian cannot afford educational costs, causing them to drop-out of school. Literacy rate in the country stood at 58% a couple of years ago, but it has since risen due to the government’s effort.
Although the quality of life has been changing, the national organiser had something to criticize: “The fact that political harassment continues to limit political freedom for many still hasn’t changed. Some landlords sack their tenants because of different opinions, even marriages come to an end in election time.”
He added: “People here are unshakable with their convictions, because they are provided with all the information needed to make their own decisions.”
As experiences came by and went, the Ghanaian man understood that politics was not a self-seeking game that should silence the will of the people. His mother used to tell him that “unity is the weapon of the strong” and he truly believes in those words that he has kept in his heart and mind preciously. Sat on his sofa, gulping down the last drops of his lemon tea, his eyes flashed with determination.
Truly, people are politics. People shape politics.
