After last Saturday’s gas and petrol explosion at two coterminous fuel-filling stations at Atomic Junction, Madina, Accra, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that such explosion at a fuel-filling station situated in a human settlement will happen again. It will not because Ti-Kelenkelen says so, for he knows what our Akan Elders say that: “Se okomfo se kuro be bo a, ono nso te mu bi” – If the prophet says the state (city or village) will collapse, he also lives in it. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because our behaviour feeds the belief, which in turn feeds our behaviour to throw up the prediction.
And so there is lowly-ness in Ti-Kelenkelen’s entire system, because beyond the fear and panic, injuries and deaths such gas-petrol explosions cause is the more disturbing concept of the reasons it keeps happening – we never learn any lessons from such preventable disasters. And that is so, simply because we change neither the way we think nor do things let alone our general behaviour after a similar disaster has occurred.
Self-fulfilling Prophecy
In psychology, self-fulfilling prophecy describes a complex relationship between beliefs and behaviour and how that relationship leads to predictions that are bound to happen simply because of that relationship. In simple language, a self-fulfilling prophecy is prediction that happens simply because a person or people hold a certain belief about the predicted event and then live their lives in a way that that behaviour makes it possible for the belief-predicted event to happen.
Thus suppose you fear (or believe) that you will die soon, yet you are fond of crossing the street without obeying the simple rules even children are taught to apply when crossing the road. As long as you are alive, it could be said that it is chance that keeps you alive. On the other hand, if you are crossing the street one day and you are knocked down by a car and die, that even could be described as a self-fulfilling prophecy; it is predictable coincidence of belief and behaviour.
The point is that self-preservation instructs that a person who fears he or she will die will take steps to protect his or her life; such a person – serbe, serbe mepenaduasa, if he or she is a normal human being – will be extra-cautious when crossing the road. And while many will describe such a person as foolish or stupid, Ti-Kelenkelen prefers the descriptive suicidal.
And so what it takes to diffuse or deflate a self-fulfilling prophecy is actualising the intention to prevent the feared belief or its inherent event from happening. Hence when similar events have happened before, yet its potent self-fulfilling prophecy remains hanging over our heads, then something is seriously out of place.
Harrowing Antecedent
There have been petrol-fuel explosions in the past, but the most harrowing is the one that happened on the night of June 3 into the morning of June 4 in 2015 at the GOIL filling station near the former GCB Tower on the Adabraka side of Kwame Nkrumah Circle, Accra. The rains fell, heavily and relentlessly, from about 6:30 P.M., on that fateful day till about 12:30 A.M., the next day. Later that day the Meteorological Services (or Authority) told us that, by average rainfall figures, six months of train came down in six hours. That was a deluge.
And Ti-Kelenkelen recalls very well that the petrol-fuel explosion happened after 11:30 PM. For having climbed to the top floor of a three-storey building (with others) to escape the human-height high flood waters and looking around the city skyline, he and a job colleague saw the explosion live and coloured.
Whatever may have caused the floods-explosion on that fateful night-and-morning may be the result of de majeure (“natural”) forces or human error or a mix of both, but the death of over 500 people that resulted was, certainly and definitely, the result of human error. For if there is law that says petrol-fuel (especially gas) filling stations are not to be situated in human settlements and people flout it by doing the precise opposite, then national administrations along with appropriate state agencies such as the Environmental Protection Authority, city authorities and the parent companies of the particular petrol fuel companies have all failed us, the people (or the state.)
Just last Saturday, Ti-Kelenkelen heard, the law preventing the situating of petrol-fuel filling stations in human settlements was amended to allow it. Amended to allow it? That adds a specific national administration and a particular Parliament to the list of culprits. If that is true, then it is a disaster, because it is retrogressive law making.
The interesting irony is that, even when the law forbade the situating of petrol-fuel filling station among settlements, it was happening. And the amended law only shows how a bad national administration and Parliament could terribly let the people down. Was this tragedy of an amendment made before or after the June3-4, 2015 disaster? If it was before, then the disaster should have told those who made the amendment that it was a bad decision; they should have gone back immediately to restore the forbidding law. If it was after the disaster, then our self-fulfilling prophecy is a more potent “clear and present danger.”
Changing the Insanity
An African American lawyer ever wrote that: “Another definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing the same way and expecting different results.” Over a decade ago, it is Ti-Kelenkelen who “discovered” and introduced that statement into Ghanaian public discourse, because when he saw that statement, it, serbe, serbe mpenaduasa, so described our situation as a state and continent. And forgive Ti-Kelenkelen for calling the creature by name, but it is necessary in the light of what this page represents – the welfare and progress of the people, especially all black people wherever they may be.
Since then, Ti-Kelenkelen has heard so many speakers on television – even persons in different national administrations – cite or paraphrase that statement, yet, with lowly-ness in his system, he can report that no one appears to be applying it. If we were, our lives should not be in the mess it is in.
You cannot keep doing the same thing the same way and expect different results. Such an expectation is the very opposite of what will really happen. And the actual outcome is what pairs up with doing the same thing the same way to create the cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy.
For us as a people, the larger problem is that such a suicidal cycle of prediction – as the Morgan Freeman character says about self-respect in Lean On Me – permeates every aspect of our lives. And it will take intention to break the cycle of the self-fulfilling prophecy. That means it will take intention to change the way we do things to bring it (our behaviour) in line with our dreams and expectations of welfare and progress. And, thanks and praises to Onyame (God or Allah) for giving us the capacity of and for intention. All we must do is use it.
Ti-Kelenkelen
…with Yirenkyi Lamptey
