Overheard!!!!!

Yen na ye gyimi( It seems we are the simpletons)

                                                                       -Reggie Rockstone, hip-life impresario, poet, thinker 

Costs me more to be free than a life in the penitentiary

                                                                     - Tupac Amaru Shakur, poet, thinker, hip-hop meister

Encounters with ATMs that do not work can be dramatic; I had my moment a few weeks ago. I slotted in my card with great expectations. Machine began that raspy sound indicating the imminent flow of cash that can trigger an orgasm if you worship mammon. Then it ceased and then posted very mournfully that totally baleful note: “ Sorry blah blah blah.” I was almost cursing. There I was low on cash and time pressed and my best bet was waiting for an hour for the bank to open for business!!! I found a seat and waited. The drama began to unfold.  In the next few minutes all who came and could not withdraw their money had this caricatured long drawn, depressing look on their faces. Some will stare at the screen in disbelief; others shook their heads; some others literally froze. Money swine as we say in Ghana!!! As I watched the interaction between man/woman and machine I pondered on Ghana and modernity. The incontrovertible logic of the industrial/post industrial machine is that stuff must WORK ALWAYS except in compelling extenuating circumstances. If you erect traffic and street lights electricity MUST flow. Taps are not decorative pieces; water MUST flow through them. If you put workers on a single spine salary structure their accounts MUST reflect the change; essentially no buts and ifs are allowable. Maybe we have not come to terms with the brutality of this logic; maybe this logic is inhuman; maybe for us this logic is just a nightmarish pretence that we are pretending to flow with; just may be……

Ghana may yet get to this if........

And then I waited still more bearing Time’s excruciating march eavesdropping on a conversation. “They come around and then convince us to support them. I will leave my dwellings at dawn and go to their rallies. I used to play the drums at such gatherings; keeping the atmosphere feisty and charged. I will keep hitting the drums till my palms felt sore, numb and red. When we got hungry they brought us buckets brimming with soaked gari and sugar and gallons of akpeteshie(local gin). Then we will go and stand in those snarling queues while the sun pounded us mercilessly and wait and vote. When they win the elections they spit us out like the saliva from early morning sawi, ta kotcha(chewing sponge). Good riddance it seems. They simply vanish like the sun dipping over the horizon after a long day’s work. We stupidly give them jobs. They put on their suits in the morning and jump into those gleaming contraptions. We are the fools. This time I will not give a job to any one and starve.” This was the monological  conversation between two security officers at the bank. Was this the conception of politics, government and governance on the street? The ordinary citizen feels used, abused and neglected and that is a time bomb that may yet blow up in the face of  our political and other elites.     

“WOMANITY!!!”

I  wrote this piece in 2008. It appeared in my weekly column “Asia 601” in the Graphic Business  newspaper. In the last few days I have had to deal directly with a hospital emergency involving my dearest wife Sylvia because she is a woman. Questions I have been pondering about Ghana’s women and their welfare assumed a far more direct potency and force in the near nightmare I experienced. These questions I will return to in subsequent writings. But this piece I dedicate to Sylvia and all Ghanaian women for being women and all the courage it takes in our Republic. Change must come!!!!!!!!!!

Duafe-The Akan(Ghana) symbol for  femininity

   I am taking poetic license here with the word above. I hope readers will grant me that privilege and in fact bear with me. Writers suffer regularly from what is known as writers block. A situation in which the brain simply switches off and ideas for writing refuse to pop up. In such a bind one has to be creative and think out of the ordinary. That is why the Czechs say that : writing is witchcraft!!! I agree this word cannot be found in any dictionary. It is my own creation and hence the quotation marks and italics. But to be sure the word is derived from a play on the word “humanity,” and reflects my focus in this piece: women.

Traffic in Beijing has reportedly eased after the historic Olympic Games in August this year. Beijing city officials took advantage of the window of opportunity offered by the quest for environmentally clean Games. Beijingers were urged to patronize public transport and a cost was imposed for having your two cars out in town at the same time. The policy has since been in place. I have been caught several times in the grind of Beijing traffic when I visited the capital on my own trysts. Making the trip from the imposing and architectural marvel that the Beijing West Railway Station is to the Diplomatic Enclave (known as Sanlitun where Ghana’s embassy is located) launches you smack into the typical Beijing traffic in the morning and evening rush hours. But the irritation of it all vaporizes watching Chinese women deftly and confidently navigating trams, coaches, double-decker buses and indeed buses of all kinds through the labyrinthine maze of metals on wheels. This sight is replicated across China.

The Chinese say that the woman holds half of heaven. This reflects the importance that women issues have in the Chinese policymakers mind. And on the streets of the China the confident strut of Chinese women cannot be missed decked out as they often are in their trousers!!! Indeed in Asia China’s women are streets ahead of their counterparts in other countries in self actualization. In Japan and Korea the social standing of the Chinese woman is a dream to be pursued. In Singapore the assembling (computers, cameras, etc) industry was built to tap the delicate touch of women in mind. Women’s issues (health, education, career etc.) in China are not simply matters of rhetoric wrapped in patronizing platitudes and vain promises that never get acted upon policy wise. I give an example. There is a women’s and children’s PUBLIC hospital about fifteen minutes walk from my campus. The ambience, the facilities and the service blow the mind. There are escalators and lifts. My heart melts seeing pregnant women all comfy and at ease riding on them. Children have play rooms outfitted with toys to divert their minds from the pain of sickness. The consultation rooms are choked with doctors. And this hospital is not in Shanghai or Beijing or Macau where money literally oozes. It seems the Chinese fashion industry is for women. Women’s bras, panties, clothing and accessories seem to be everywhere and at affordable prices. And by God our beloved women in Ghana are so down on their luck some still settle for second hand panties and bras!!! And this is the reality of those who will bear and nurture the next generation!!!

Ghana’s women deserve a better DEAL. I have been following the discourse on women’s issues in Ghana closely. The Ghanaian ladies leading it are doing their bit. Only that I am sometimes irritated by a discourse that seems to be influenced too inordinately by the Western experience. What we require in Ghana is not a battle of the sexes but a conversation of the sexes. The Ghanaian woman played a vital role in the independence struggle. She has continued to move the Ghanaian economy and lent her silky inimitable skills to running the home. I have been influenced by three women: my mother, my primary school headmistress and my wife. They in their own ways have left deep marks on me I cannot quantify or downplay. We have a Women’s ministry, yes. But its worth will lie in the accelerated progress our women make and in the shortest possible time. Our society should bow its head in shame for the limited support we have offered our women over the decades. In this new century our Republic must rise to this challenge and quickly!!! On this matter some of us will not rest. That is a PROMISE!!!                      

Freakish Brain Gain

 Adwene nko, nyansa nko(the mind and wisdom are not twin born)

- Akan(Ghana) Sages

Nyansapo, the Adinkra(Akan) symbol for  wisdom

Jack London’s immortal “ Call of the Wild” and its riveting imageries of howling dogs could well have provided the context. In this case however it was the Accra of the 1980s. The wind will howl like a zillion demons baying for their nocturnal dinner as we sat at our Momma Ama Otwiwa’s feet on the seventh floor of Nkrumah’s Flats at Lartebiokorshie, Accra. Ghana was caught in a revolutionary fervor. Some of the central figures of this revolution lived a floor below and in the other block across us. Ama Otwiwa will spin her yarns about Kwaku Ananse the master trickster who in reality was a hallowed sage(thanks for the education Nana Nketsia V); that was how we occasionally spent those numbing curfews. In this particular story Agya Ananse will wage a war on the mind. Intent on becoming the smartest dude in the world he employs shenanigans to collect the brains of all human beings and stores them in a kuku(pot) . His next task: find a place to keep the brains where no mortal can have access. Agya Ananse settles on an arboreal location of dizzying height. The great pot with its prized content is strung over Agya Ananse’s belly; in order that his eyes will keep an eternal and ever alert watch.  A conundrum emerges: how to scale the tree. Several attempts fail.

Then the loquacious Ntikuma, product of Agya Ananse’s loins emerges. “Papa…..you cannot climb the tree that way.” “ Firi ho….abofra bone(get away….bad boy)….wo nyansa ye ahi?(what wisdom do you have?).” Ntikuma persists. “ Papa just place the pot behind you.” Ntikuma had cracked the puzzle. So someone else could think better than Agya Ananse after all. In a rage Agya Ananse smashes the pot. The moral: Tiriko nko agyina(One head cannot sit in council). Clearly Akan thinkers had pondered about the mind for millennia; trying to map out its form and function. In Western thought this cerebral wonderment is reflected in British philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s “ Ghost in a machine” phrase which wrestles with the absurdity of Cartesian dualism on the mind’s independent career vis-à-vis the body. In our times the mind has come to the fore in discourses on immigration from the global South to the global North. The case is being made that far from causing a brain drain this movement of some of Africa’s finest minds must be seen as a brain gain; these immigrants have gone to drink at the fount of knowledge where they went. I discussed this with a faculty colleague Charlie.

I will call it a freakish brain gain. The costs have been enormous in my experience. My Dad has five brothers and a sister. In the madness of Jerry Rawlings revolution(was it rather a convolution? It seems all the ills that era sought to deal with have returned; evolved; mutated) I lost two of my uncles and my only direct paternal aunt(Auntie Millicent) who simply migrated. And several other relations of the Som/Amoah Ebusua(Clan). True they have thrived intellectually, professionally and materially. But that gain must be weighed against uncles and aunties I never know personally; cousins who are strangers to me and cannot speak Akuapem Twi; a new generation born and raised in the Diaspora and alien to the rites, rituals, world view, wisdom, lore and legends of their most recent ancestors who they never knew. How will the Som/Amoah Ebusua ensure its continuity in the 21^st century and indeed will the Ebusua of yore be the same in its underlying logics as that of this century? More brutally will the Ebusua survive as the shaper of identity; as the social safety net; as the transmitter of ancient wisdom?  What a freakish brain gain!!!!

On Ghana’s Youth and Joblessness

You must respect that hustling

                                                                        - Joseph Hill of Culture

Our woman on the her daily grind; where's her Republic?

The freshness and crispness of the African morning provides an almost surreal setting. Accra the 100 year plus old capital is about stirring then. The cocks crow, the birds chirp, the horns start tooting; the daily hustle begins. And this daily hustle begins very early in Accra for us all including her. There she comes; all comely and calm swaying delightfully those confounding elements that make her an African woman. Then she hits her world which is carved out of the very ribs of the street; the Ghanaian architectural maestro David Adjaye(www.adjaye.com) will love this. A fabric proudly forlorn is thrown gallantly over a wire fence to serve as screen for a dining area. In a flash her kitchen begins to hum; smoke bellows from the coal pot and the gas stove too. Soon the diners will line up to have their go. Her frenetic pace is unbroken until the sun retires and darkness creeps on us earthlings: Adi sa a na adi asa to wit night fall has a certain finality! If this is not entrepreneurship I do not know what this concept means.

Our woman’s intensity, hard work, focus and consistency is reflected amongst Ghanaians. At the universities, in the factories, on the farms and the streets. The young of our Republic constitute the largest chunk of this work force which it seems has been left to its wretched fate. The argument has gone abroad lately that the debilitating joblessness that Ghana faces currently must be the product of a certain shiftiness and indeed lack of entrepreneurship amongst the youth. This word has become the magic portion of an assortment of business specialists, conmen and women and even policy makers who believe that planting this idea in the cranium and hearts of Ghana’s young people will unlock the doors to work and happiness. They might have a point admittedly but just a miserly point on a very complicated question that stalks our Republic in our times. True it will be useful for our woman to keep her books; have a basic facility with figures and figure out how to increase her share of the market. But that is just a fraction of her needs. Where does she lay her head? How does she get to her empire in the making in the mornings? Where and how does she get water to cook and at what cost bodily, financially and psychologically? How much of her stuff can the ordinary man or woman on the street afford? Can she afford the rent for new space for the business if it begins to expand? What kind of health system exists for her if she falls sick? These are the questions that need answering if we want to be serious about dealing decisively with our joblessness conundrum.

The transport, health, housing, educational and power systems among others must function at the very least  reliably as vital co-operant factors if our potential and actual entrepreneurs are to have a chance to take on West Africa, Africa and the world. The Ghanaian state has become a pale shadow of its true self seduced by dubious ideas from without which urged her to stand haplessly and helplessly by as a nonchalant observer in weighty matters affecting our Republic. The Ghanaian Republic and those who manage it must stand up for its people by becoming that very interested, active, creative, daring, innovative partner in the search for enduring answers to the challenge of joblessness. And this as a duty; not a left handed favor loaded with crumbs for citizens who are seen as lowly imbeciles who must drool and prostrate for such condescending help.

The story is told of Keng Swee then minister of finance of Singapore in its early years. This country faced the same unemployment challenges Ghana now faces. One day as Keng Swee drove from work he espied hordes of young people returning home from school. Keng Swee lowered his head in shame and pondered where the jobs were going to come from to allow them earn their keep. Almost in tears he vowed to put Singaporeans to work. For the results check out this data on per capita income for 2010(World Bank and CIA data): Singapore, $43,324.00; Ghana, $1600.00. Ghana’s ministers might shed tears over their dented four wheelers!!!!!!

ps: when will Ghana have accessible, periodic figures on unemployment??????????  

WE ARE LIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This piece appeared in the Graphic Business in 2008 in a column I penned called     “ Asia 601”. I was looking this week for the words that would inspire my fellow compatriots amidst what sometimes seems like an encircling, depressing darkness. Suffering from the writer’s block I pulled this out from my archives. I guess being reminded of our greatness now and again can be useful and invigorating.Kindly read on.....

Raring for action!!!

This denouement was riveting indeed. Achilles was frothing at the mouth in fury as he bellowed out the name of Hector ensconced behind Troy’s city walls. The almost immortal Achilles was seeking a duel to the death for the slaying of his beloved cousin Patroclus by Hector. Hector’s younger brother Paris had unleashed his uncontrollable libido on a very married Helen and eloped with her. This was a casus belli for the Greeks to attack the Trojans in this European epic penned by Homer in his immortal Iliad. In the movie “Troy” this war of antiquity is brought alive by the commanding performance of a star studded cast including the late Peter O’toole, Eric Bana and Brad Pitt. I have watched this flick umpteen times. This particular scene seems to be one of my best.  

An exposure to the classics as an academic discipline would make this piece digestible I must confess. But in our worrying focus on profits and the market (which should not be a bad thing) some look down on the Classics Department at Legon as a waste of time and money; utterly irrelevant. But the truth is that philosophy (logic) has a hand in the PC in front of you and globalization had its roots in the ancient world! But I digress! 

Hector bounds out of the gates of Troy and not before biding an ominous farewell to his father King Priam and other nobles. The stage is set for what was a slaughter. Before squaring off and in no doubt about his fate Hector asks that his body be given to his family. Achilles's response is deep: “Lions do not make pacts with men.” Achilles was the lion. Fearless, peerless, confident in his fighting prowess; almost imperious. The lion is native to Africa. In Ghana’s coat of arms a lion is engraved slam dunk in the center. This feline unchallenged master of the wild can break the back of an adult zebra with one strike of its paw. Its roar which can be heard three miles away is the loudest of all animals and leaves in its wake a cloud of dust and scurrying prey. It pursues its prey usually as a team or alone employing a beguiling mix of stealth, scientific prudence, tenacity, clear headedness, exactitude and intensity. In short shock and awe tempered with forbearance!!! Google the phrase “the Lion city” and Singapore’s name pops up. Neither Ghana nor any African country. Indeed this city state has branded itself as the lion of the world a fact reflected in statues of this shaggy quadruped spouting water at key points in that country. 

And so I wonder what happened to Ghana’s own branding exercise? What happened to the “gateway to West Africa” packaging maneuver? West Africa not even Africa if you noticed dear reader! And a gate? What can a gate symbolize to energize a people whose history, achievements and potential provides a window into boundless possibilities that still tarries? I will say WE ARE LIONS!!! And on this point I was scandalized by the comments of the kindly doctor Mahama when he proffered a response to a question at the Institute of Economic Affairs Presidential Debate in Accra recently. He looked Ghanaians in the face and called us “ignorant” because if it was in America every kid would know that fiber could be obtained from cocoa. Every kid? Come on Doc. There are Americans who cannot read nor write. Our presidential aspirants should INSPIRE us not run us into the ground. Without an inspired people the most well crafted policies will remain just that: policies. An inspired people will turn half chances into gilded opportunities.

The second stanza of our national anthem inspires with these lines:

With our gifts of mind and strength of arm,

 Whether night or day, in mist or storm,

 In every need whate'er the call may be,

 To serve thee, Ghana, now and evermore

  It is only lions who can stand up to this task and produce results the world will marvel at. The choice is ours!      

  

35, 45, 70? Firaw(Volta). Who Cares Anymore?

Canoes on the Volta

Depressing memories of  the Akoto Lante Tragedy keep flooding to my mind lately. In the early 80s while still in primary school fourteen school children drowned gorily in a discarded well in James Town. They were as children like to do romping away carefree atop this abandoned well that had apparently been sealed off. The whole of Ghana went into mourning. The national flag eternally proud in its arresting hues of red, gold and green with that tellingly prominent black star was flown at half mast. Rawlings then chairman of the Provincial National Defense Council(PNDC) was at that harrowing burial at Awudome Cemetery. This our Republic went into mourning as one man(woman). As a lad I had nightmares the result I guess of my mind playing back all those painful images of caskets bearing the frozen lifeless bodies of kids whose only crime was that they were playing.

Here we are today. A massive national tragedy has befallen us. On the Firaw several of our compatriots have lost their lives. It is a telling testimony of our collective state of mind that this occurrence is seen as just one of those things. No flags fly at half mast. I have not heard any statement from the presidency. The opposition leader Nana Akufo-Addo is not showing leadership on this: he is as mute as the vast expanse of Mars! There is an almost cursory, laid back, breezy, jocular, nonchalant attitude in the media(though it must be said our media has carried the news but without its famed intensity on Obinim and NPP and NDC issues). Civil society is not up in arms on what has become an almost maddening routine of our ordinary compatriots dying needlessly on the Firaw. NADMO seems out of sorts; an almost pathetic national disaster response outfit run by an otherwise intense gentleman who seems tired. As I write we are not sure how many actually perished.  As I monitored the news NADMO’s  presence on the Firaw was all but absent. No divers with oxygen tanks on their back racking the under belly of the Firaw to find at the very least the bodies (including babies and our dearest women)  of this our dear compatriots; bona fide citizens of this our Republic. No speed boats in sight. On one television network the report was that there was just one naval officer on site after almost 48 hours. I recall the recent tragedy at a ‘Galamsey” site that involved quite a number of young people. The same national nonchalance;  same ambivalence by our national leadership.

The regrettable irony is that we mourn with solemnity (with some pointed official gestures) the recent Japanese Tsunami victims and the dead of  9/11 and the Norway massacre( and rightly so because of our common humanity) but think it is okay for our very own to die foolishly. Have we become numb to tragedy and death and suffering and inhumanity as a nation? I mean dead bodies are always graphically shown in the media without the slightest respect for the dead which our far wiser ancestors would not do. If needless pain and death is now acceptable with what urgency will we pursue our national transformation drive? With what urgency will we get pontoons on the Firaw, fix our roads and hospitals and schools and filth choked environment? There is a very short route from such inhumanity to cutting each other up and ultimately incinerating this our beloved Republic. Yen oman yi abo ana??????????????????????????????????            

我们怎么了(WO MEN ZEN ME LA)!!!!!!!!!!!!! 我们怎么办 (WO MEN ZEN ME BAN)!!!!!

If  the strokes and words above remain undecipherable to you I understand fully. You do not dear reader owe me an apology for that. Not in the least. However it indicates that you are not particularly ready for  China’s (and with that Asia’s) increasingly visible presence on the African continent which I predict will grow exponentially as this century marches on.

Let us do some class work now. Written Mandarin comes in two forms. There is the han zi which are those seemingly esoteric strokes( but ultimately very learnable; after some perspiration though) you see on the signage for Chinese restaurants. Then there is the pinyin which uses Roman alphabets to capture the sounds in Mandarin( a highly tonal language). All this can be exasperating for the uninitiated. Like I am with the managers of our Republic on this matter.

I flip to the centre pages of the September 3 edition of  the venerable Daily Graphic (p.16). And there I find the Veep   Mr. John Dramani Mahama with a trowel in hand ably laying some stones to symbolically mark the commencement of work on Ghana’s new Ministry of Foreign Affairs complex. The damage to Ghana’s treasury is a cool $15million interest free loan from the Republic of China. This should be a joyous occasion undoubtedly. I recall rushing out camera in hand to the forlorn and burnt out Ghana Foreign Ministry building a few months ago. I was in deep pain. How many historical documents have we lost? All the hard work of Kwame Nkrumah and others on Ghana’s foreign policy gone up in flames? Where will researchers start from? There was no enquiry on this documentary question as far as I can recall. How did we come to this? A little detour. But back to the subject. Of course our Foreign Ministry needs  a new home. But key question is whether Chinese contractors( in this case Yanjian Construction Company of China) should have been handed the job?

Any country’s foreign policy has both clandestine and overt components. The physical infrastructure serves as a vital vehicle for the conduct of foreign policy. For such a building will serve as  a crucible for highly classified conversations, documents and strategic maneuvers in the pursuit of any nation’s vital interests. An edifice such as this should also serve as a spatial and architectural statement of our Ghanaian-ness and the ideals we seek and the force and spirit we represent and embody as we deal with the world. Wisdom should dictate that Ghanaians run the show in such critical national projects. China’s record in Ghana on constructing vital national buildings has left China’s marks and gifted the Chinese with too much knowledge of Ghana’s national secrets I think. The new Ministry of Defense building is a classic case in point. That building looks Chinese not Ghanaian (with  han zi inscriptions to boot). Ditto the National Theatre. The Jubilee House (now controversially christened Flag Staff House) was a baby of such confusion in our leaders minds. After all the dough for the proposed Foreign Ministry building is a loan from China not a gift and utilizing Ghanaian minds and brawn in the main makes sense. And in making this point I do not seek to question the logic of tapping into foreign expertise Chinese or otherwise. Key point is to do this on our terms. As the Chinese do and did and India too.

Here I will not blame the Chinese. I studied in that country and can humbly claim a more than perfunctory understanding of the Chinese mind. If China’s strategists have an advantage they will squeeze it dry. The Ghanaian case seems to be a typical example of a buyers market for China in which the sellers(Ghanaians) have seemingly abandoned their interests. Caught in such a situation the Chinese will quip in exasperation: 我们怎么了 (what happened to us)? And then add too: 我们怎么办(what do we do)?