Since 1965 when it was founded to protect and promote the interests of Ghanaian students, the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) has been correcting all that is wrong in Ghana’s progress, especially during the one-party autocratic regimes and brutal military juntas, but little on morals. In spite of helping midwife Ghana’s democracy sometimes resulting in deaths, NUGS is seen as an unnecessary confronter, unrealistic critic, and forum for immature play.

Suddenly, as if responding to Ghana’s Vice President Aliu Mahama’s long-running war against indiscipline and general moral decadence, NUGS appears to have had self-awareness and moral refreshment, and is talking of halting “general decline of moral standard in schools.” NUGS's self-pity on the moral crisis of Ghanaian students, and more appropriately the youth, was further shattered when Ghana’s leading independent newspaper, the Accra-based The Ghanaian Chronicle, in an investigative expose, published that students in Ghana’s second largest city, Kumasi, patronize prostitutes. This has generated worst public relation problems for NUGS. How do Ghanaian students keep on in the face of moral decline in the form of poor hygiene, examination crimes, prostitution, irrationality, mendacity, weak grasp of Ghana’s cultural values, embracing foreign values, weak civic virtues, and general spiritual weaknesses?

NUGS has found an amazing solution: they feel sorry for themselves. In NUGS’ own mind, they have solved their own formidable moral problems by declaring themselves the injured party in a nation that is increasingly counting on the moral virtues of its youth to carry on its generational development mission. Child abuse is an area NUGS is yet to incorporate into its claimed new moral vision. A filthy conscience often goes to hide in the refuge of self-pity. As the Accra Daily Mail editorialized, “NUGS has cried, let us rally and help!” And the leading mass circulation, the Accra-based the Daily Graphic, found NUGS’ self-pity so troublesome that it not only carried NUGS’ moral dilemma in its front page but shouted “NUGS WAGES MORAL WAR.”

NUGS has other means to talk itself into an attitude of aggrieved innocence in its sociological sub-culture of Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, and calls for the “reactivation and strengthening of the counseling system in schools” to contain the group’s moral crisis. This will help it take the mounting emotional challenges Ghanaian students face in the face of never-ending poverty and unemployment head-on: mounting filth, growing individualism against Ghanaian/African value of communalism, increasing occult and superstitious beliefs, anguish, despair, globalization, hatred, tribalism, stupidity, elders who do not nurture their children well, and a country that appears not to have realistic youth policies to tackle youth problems.

The deeply disturbing NUGS self-pity has projected all around itself a siege of malevolent conspiracy. Actually, as NUGS opens itself up, in some sort of nation-wide therapeutic session, in the climate of Ghana’s developing democracy and human rights culture, the Accra Daily Mail, among others, is urging it to fight the vices that have brought its long-running self-pity: “rape, drug abuse, sexual excesses, pregnancies, vandalism, nudity, theft, alcoholism and occultism.” As a group, NUGS has the potential to wage a national moral campaign to correct the deep-seated vices it has found itself in over the years and which is entangling Ghana’s progress. In this sense, it has the will to transform its sense of narcissistic self-pity to moral heroism in its group context: a fierce, virtuous assertion of NUGS as a group. It is from here that NUGS can change its self-pity to selflessness and, by its moral mission, righteousness.

The Ghanaian Chronicle’s expose of Kumasi students patronizing prostitutes, in addition to NUGS’s own acceptance of its morally sicknesses, is an indication of how democratization of Ghana’s communications is bringing a reign of sunshine in which the germs of decline of moral standards of students is having trouble surviving.