'Fix the Country' or 'Fix Your Attitudes': A Corpus-Based Study of the #FixTheCountry Protest in Ghana

From democratic states to autocratic regimes, citizens have often resorted to mass protest as a channel to express their discontent about the repugnant acts of their governments. The unified voice of these protestors has sometimes been the crux for instigating change. In August 2021, the citizens of Ghana took to the streets in what became the genesis of a national movement labelled 'Fix The Country.' The movement, meant to be politically-neutral, was aimed at calling the Ghanaian government to kickstart a social, political, and economic reform. Twitter, a microblogging site, helped fuel the protest, as citizens utilized the hashtag #FixTheCountry to express their thought about the protest. This study, which is corpus-based, retrieved 10,000 tweets to investigate how the movement transpired via Twitter and its implication for Ghana's Democracy and overall development. By performing word cloud and sentiment analysis, the study reveals that Twitter was utilized by protestors as a potent tool for amplifying their thoughts to their political elites; it was also deployed as a medium for mobilizing street protests and also for soliciting funds to push forward the movement. However, the study further argues that the endemic of political polarization propelled the Ghanaian Twittersphere to tag the movement on political lines. In light of this, the study postulates that the act of political polarization corrodes the movement, which could explain why it is struggling to inspire the anticipated change. The study recommends that the citizens should utilize Twitter as a tool to collectively call for change instead of deploying it to exacerbate political polarization, a phenomenon that undermines Democracy and attenuates people's power of resistance.