NDOUM'S GREAT LEAP BACKWARDS????????

I have been pondering Dr. Nduom's fall out with the CPP and his rather confounding belief that he can be president of this our Republic by forming, heading and leading a movement to electoral victory in one year!!!! I have no qualms with his ambitions. But listening to him for years I am not sure what his PROGRAM IS beyond the over flocked pro-business outlook which is just talk in the face of the MASSIVE GEO-STRATEGIC,  GEO-POLITICAL AND GEO-ECONOMIC RE-CONFIGURATIONS of our times.

 From a distance I do not see his connection with the MASSES; it is at best strained and put on(I have been to Elmina and heard what some ordinary folks think of him politically!!!). The logic is that if he understood the centrality of the MASSES to our politics today he would have pushed for building the CPP into a POWER WINNING AND RETAINING ORGANIZATION. All our major parties have become essentially ELECTORAL MACHINES seeking POWER without a membership exposed conscientiously to the WHYS and WHEREFORES of the party(beyond its own sentimental, weepy, origination narratives and imported ideologies) and the NATIONAL AGENDA. This gap is therefore filled by a brutal cost-benefit calculus which powers the search for POWER and when POWER is attained is FREELY vented and lays the basis for its quick lose. The NPP between 2000-2008 was a classical example and the NDC at this juncture(and also from 1992-2000). This is the Ndoum pathology which he will come to terms with rather too late!!!!  

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!!

In the confounding cycles of Time and Seasons here we are again! I wish you all a restful, fun-filled and contemplative holidays! And for Ghana may the flow of time lead us to WHERE WE SEEK TO BE!!!!!

Urban Wail II: Water Spaces

Revelers at denuded beach

This piece is a sequel to the one I penned last week. I just finished the Per Ankh edition of Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments which was originally published in 1969. For me Ayi Kwei Armah is one of contemporary Ghana’s sharpest minds; one of those rare breed of geniuses who Nature’s God deigns once in a long while to throw at us earthlings. And it is his life-long commitment to the cause of Ghana and Africa in his work unlike some other thinkers in this our Republic that I most admire. Armah NEVER traded his genius for drossy silver offered by salivating politicos in order to promote their too often nefarious game of mass exploitation. Currently ensconced in Popenguine, Senegal in a serene location by the sea Armah has almost abandoned Ghana (at least spatially) like the Russian great mind Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did Russia; though in the former case there is a voluntary twist. I recommend Solzhenitysn’s(1995; Farrar, Straus and Giroux) moving expository prose: The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century.

Man and Woman cannot live by water alone!!

To return to Fragments  Armah describes in fine detail the Tema Beach Road(TBR) which represents one of the two main approaches(the other is the Kwame Nkrumah Motorway) to Ghana’s industrial heartland, Tema from downtown Accra. Why only two till this day I cannot fathom. It shows how intelligent our leaders have been thus far. Eerily the TBR has scarcely changed since Armah was inspired by it. The sea still surges forward violently yet beautifully as it wears away by the minute its land barrier (how long will the TBR last?).Armah reported then that nobody was paying mind to a looming catastrophe; same same story. In one important departure though this beach now hosts throngs of our compatriots on especially national holidays and literally bursts at the seams on such occasions. In all truth it was not meant for such a purpose. But there is a plaintive subtext which hums to my mind whenever I drive past and see all those shiny 4 wheelers, motorbikes and families and lovers. Accra is facing a severe dearth of outlets for recreation. Our city has become moribund. Our city has become a necropolis dedicated fittingly to desiccating, soul sapping, imagination clogging, routines of bauble hawking and the in-out tray. We do not have places to play. How can we THINK? One searches in vain for a place to just sit with greenery and birds and insects to just watch the world go by in slow-mo. But you cannot search in vain for those ugly concrete structures with their fake shimmer popping out here and there in this our city. CONCRETE JUNGLE.

Toying with Poseidon's Fury?????

This brings me to another beach. In Elmina. Where Azambuja berthed and changed our history in the 15^th century. After Henry the Navigator had mastered the art of navigation from our hands and changed the world. MASTERY(NOT DOMINATION) OF THE SEA.  If only we UNDERSTOOD. Now we are mining gold on the beaches. Could it be all about a collective fevered mind so bent on overnight riches (like all those raffles and churches promise) that in a hallucinatory state sees gold everywhere? And the authorities seemed to have looked on while the beach excavation flowered. Now the denuding of our lands inland has been brought to the shore front. Aquatic galamsey. Soon enough we will be digging gold on the Motorway inspired by the Elmina Gold Rush.  It is all very confusing and more so because those who lead are the most confused it seems!!!!!       

Urban Wail: Waterless places!!!

The water has been out for close to a week where I live. The taps literally pass vapidly and yet with a certain relish gales of wind when in a fit of amnesia you turn them on(just like hitting the switch when it is pitch dark and your candles, osɔno, rechargeable lamps etc are in full glow!). It is clear that the Kpong Water Works (which serves the eastern part of Accra including Ghana’s industrial heartland Tema) has made a profession of going comatose on us every few days. Of course it will after close to five decades since its installation without any major rehab or augmentation (any plans to do so lie in policymakers's cranium and decades of hoary speeches of teasing reassurances; in 2009 the Ghanaian Times newspaper reported that $273m loan http://www.newtimes.com.gh/story/803 had been contracted for major works at Kpong!). At such distressing moments one needs a catharsis. Here it is in a free verse I titled :

How many patches can Kpong take?(pix courtesy:http://www.newtimes.com.gh)

Waterless Places

So what will happen to the newborn?

Diapers soaked; her attire vomit sodden; a refreshing bath required

And what happens to Momma too?

Perspiration enveloped; bra mammary milk laden; apparel and flesh saliva pock marked because baby finds nipples everywhere and sucks!

Water is gone; Kpong is tired after too many patches; obre womu; obra ben ni?

You live in an apartment; reservoir tank on the roof has run out; you are ten in the house(clan)hold; Monday cometh; school and work beckons; no water in sight!

The loo reeks of urine and more; the kitchen sink sags with unwashed dishes; everyone has become a magician; performing magical tricks with sachets of water for all of life’s daily ablutions!

The yellow gallons are out in force; the search for water in waterless places

No wonder water is now commoditized and sold like kenkey!

So if Kpong is fixed well who will buy such water?

Where are those with power in these times (who we vote for ALWAYS!)?

Do they remember the lactating woman?

Do they spare a long thought for the newborn who just joined us?

Do they remember the sick who need cleaning and the elderly and pauper who must alas quench that thirst?

Greatest irony: when it rains water kills us in Accra!!!!!!!

LETS SAVE GHANA MUSIC FROM THE WATERS NOW.

The heart rending email below was sent to me by the president of the Ghana Studies Association(an association of scholars from all over the world who focus on Ghana in their work). It relates the effects on Prof. John Collins(and his decades of painstaking work to preserve,research and document Ghana music) of the recent floods in Accra. Though of British ancestry he is now a full Ghanaian citizen and in his very unassuming and inimitable style he has passionately focused on preserving Ghanaian and indeed indigenous African music. I have read some of John's scholarly work and met him a couple of times. For those with connections to the powers that be(who should be directing resources to such   undertakings)  sending the message will be useful. Lets donate our bits and pieces. I love my Ghana music to bits. I just listened this dusk to Kojo Antwi's magical "Hini me" as I drove past the beach on the beach road at Tema ; there was a certain calming surreality as the African sun dipped and as the sea sprayed those gossamer like mists; crushed upon those rocks with both intensity and a caressing tenderness and Kojo Antwi just crooned away. I WANTED TO STOP AND MAKE THE GULF OF GUINEA MY BED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ps: see http://www.discogs.com/artist/John+Collins+(15); 

http://www.ugspalegon.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7%3Aprofessor-e-john..&limitstart=4;
http://www.discogs.com/Various-Ghana-Special-Modern-Highlife-Afro-Sounds-Ghanaian-Blues-1968-81/master/207675

please send notes to John here:

Phone: 233(0)24­3239488 or 233(0)21­421964

Email: jcollins@ug.edu.gh

Dear GSA members,

Many of our members have been affected by the recent floods in Ghana, including John Collins, who sends the following report on damage to his music studio and archives and an appeal for assistance. Please share with your colleagues. I am willing to collect donations from GSA members to forward to John - simply mail a check to us (with a note indicating it is a donation to Bokoor House) or make a donation (again with a note) via paypal.

All the best,

Dennis Laumann
GSA President

FLOOD DISASTER AT JOHN COLLINS BOKOOR HOUSE ACCRA GHANA AND  PARTIAL DESTRUCTION OF ITS BOKOOR AFRICAN POPULAR MUSIC ARCHIVES FOUNDATION  (BAPMAF)

Dear colleagues, supporters, fans, friends, press and well-wishers  – as you may know I am a musician, musicologist and music lecturer at the University of Ghana - and I  have been operating the BAPMAF music archives in Ghana since  1990. This NGO was set up to preserve and promote Ghanaian and other African popular music and was partly opened at my Bokoor House to the public in 1996 and more fully in 2007. However, devastation struck in the middle of the night of 26th Oct 2011 in the form of a flood. This occurred over many parts of Accra due to an unseasonal and massive rainfall compounded by more and more people building in or blocking water ways - so that rivers could no longer easily run into the sea. In our particular Taifa-Ofankor area this was compounded by the construction of a 3 mile section of the Kumasi highway (from Achimota to Ofankor) without adequate storm gutters - and also saw-millers in my immediate neighbourhood - some of whom have been anti socially been dumping sawdust in rivers and wetlands for the last few years

We residents have complained to both the Ghana National Highways Authority and the Ga District Assembly (Council) over the years to no avail. Indeed the National Highways Authority told us residents that they had to build the road first before constructing the drains and that these 2 projects even fell under 2 different Ministries. Furthermore, the MUUS saw-millers  next to us, who are relative newcomers to  the area, did not allow space on their adjacent land to ours for a gutter. Infact by dumping sawdust on the drainage river (Brenyah River) they re-directed part of this river though my house and garden – which broke my wall – they are even now claiming my garden house and BAPMAF premises is their ‘natural’ gutter.

The resulting flooding on the 26 Oct was unprecedented with almost 6 feet of water entering our land and 4.5 feet into the downstairs house and premises where some of the BAPMAF archival holdings are kept. I was in Mali at the time at an African popular music conference organized by the French Institute in conjunction with and the Malian Ministry of Culture. On returning to Ghana on the 29 Oct I met my family perched upstairs in the BAPMAF exhibition space. They had escaped drowning by 2 minutes due to a timely call from a neighbor upstream who noticed the water build up and got them to leave the house and flee upstairs

Some of the losses are as follows

· Approx 10-20% 0f BAPMAF archival holding lost. Some we are still trying to dry and salvage.

· Loss of all electronic equipment including materials donated a few years ago to the BAPMAF archives by the German Goethe Institute for a digitization project.

· Loss of car, backup generator, various pumps, CD players, DVD players, 4 track recording machines, scanners, printers, record players etc . etc .

· Losses of masses of personal property of myself, my wife and son.

The house and area is now too dangerous for human habitation (i.e. residential purposes at ground level ). All this due to the short sightedness of the civic authorities in not insisting the National Highways Authority build storm gutters alongside the highway they have been constructing for seven years (which incidentally also went under water on the  26 Oct ). And also the civic authorities inability to stop individuals or saw-millers etc from building on or blocking natural water flows.

As this is not likely to be resolved in the near future I have no recourse but to remove myself and my family from the downstairs  house that myself and my father before me have been living since the 1970’s – and to temporarily move upstairs to  the BAPMAF exhibition room and unoccupied shop area - and   later maybe find rented property where we will not be drowned like rats

So my immediate plans are as follows :-

· Find temporary storage space for the BAPMAF archives and temporary accommodation until the government enacts policies that will alleviate the flooding in the Ofankor-Taifa area through the construction of storm gutters and the stopping of sawdust and other obstacles being dumped (or even built) in the natural drainage areas

· Build circa 200 feet of reinforced concrete wall with gravel embankment to immediately  protect the Bokoor/BAPMAF proper from  flooding – so I and the BAPMAF archives can at least operate in the upstairs properties. This wall alone will cost around 7000$

· To replace tens of thousand of dollars of lost equipment, computers, car, scanners, cameras, digital record player, stabilizers, chargers and 12 volt battery backup system, slide projector etc etc

· At some point I will write to various individuals and organizations that donated  books, videos and DVD’s and music materials to BAPMAF to send me , if possible, replacement copies.

Now is a critical time and I would greatly appreciate your suggestions on how I could overcome this catastrophe and move forward. If you have any suggestions as how I could proceed – including any agencies, individuals, organizations who could assist financially in this reconstruction as well as  replacing lost books and music this would be most appreciated. Publicising and circulating this appeal on your networks and  blogs would also be most welcome - as would letters of sympathy.

Yours sincerely John Collins (Prof)

Ps Please send money to support the essential work of rebuilding this unique archive to my UK bank account at follows

NATWEST, Tottenham Court Rd Branch

P.O.BOX 2EA 45 Tottenham Court Rd. London WIT 2EA

Reward Reserve Account of E .J. Collins

Account number 265922a58

Sort Code 56-00-31

Swift code NWBK GB 2L IBAN number GB16 NWBK 56003126 5922 58

COMMUNITY POWER!!!

The ochre building

I was returning from a visit to my loving parents when this ochre building with blue trimmings in the compound of the Accra Teacher Training College struck me. The signage indicated that it was a community library for young people. My interest piqued as I drove on. And I pondered. Libraries nurture young minds and ignite that fiery, incurable life- long passion for books, learning and the unyielding search for knowledge which every society needs to confront its existential challenges. Libraries have impacted my life deeply.

The small library at Morning Star  Preparatory School in the 1980s was my kingdom; this was a veritable treasure trove of information. There I read about Kwaku Ananse(the Ghanaian sage anti-hero), Loki the perennial trouble causer god of Norse mythology and of course the Iliad(when I confronted it as a Classics student at the University of Ghana, Legon it was familiar terrain); in that library I circumnavigated the world a zillion times in my mental interstices before I ever leaped bodily across the oceans into other climes. In my high school years the Ghana Library Board facility (then obviously losing its verve but still very useful) in down town Accra near the Ghana Supreme Court buildings was a regular haunt. By my twenties I had visited every library(

Children doing their thing!

joined  where possible and borrowed books) in Accra. I noticed in the last few years the demise of those libraries I was familiar with in our capital. The British Council Library suffered a meltdown and has morphed into a confounding temple for profits (which should not be a bad thing except that the profit motive incinerated the library). The Martin Luther King ,Jr, Library began to unravel after the George Bush, Jr., led cuts on such facilities and has relocated to the fortification that is the American Embassy(too many guns and war like infrastructure in sight to attract an unarmed potential reader and too way out of town!!). The W.E.B Dubois Library is struggling while the George Padmore Research Library on African Affairs is just soldiering on. Today as a society we seem enamored of actively building malls, stalls, stores and drinking spots not thinking spaces like libraries in our communities and that is how we have choked off the circuitry for  fresh imaginings, deep self reflection and the sheer  pleasure of mental exercise.

The Nima Learning Centre

To return to the ochre building it turns out that Nima Community Library(and its adjoining Learning Centre) where I shared some thoughts on leadership last Friday was part of a chain(I engaged with staff from this chain of libraries in Ghana) painstakingly and determinedly put up by Kathy Knowles(a Canadian) and her Ghanaian collaborators. I love the Learning centre outfitted with a stage for in-house theatrical productions and the spacious reading room above it. My area Sakumono and the Manets of this world definitely need this   kind of space. The Africa themed décor of both the library and Learning Centre connect its young patrons to who they are (the children’s story books which depict the children’s everyday realities and produced in-house as well further reinforce this). I was extremely happy that the Republic of Ghana through the Accra Metropolitan Assembly was picking the tabs for utilities and the staff. This is what creative governance should be about; this to my mind is the meaning of local government where concerned citizens engage a sensible, agile, considerate government and her assigns in tackling the everyday challenges of all of us unencumbered by domineering, seducing ideas of social and economic organization from elsewhere. One can espy Nima lying placidly below from the balcony of the Learning Centre with her dizzying patchwork of brown roofs; what other heights can’t Nima and indeed our Republic reach with community power?


ps: all pixes taken from the Osu Children Library Fund website.          

OIL JUANDICE

I shared this piece on my g-mail thread this morning; Enjoy!!!


Nana Nketia as usual lays it unvarnished:http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=224074.

Sekondi-Takoradi(my birthplace) and surrounding areas already feeling the social fall out of this oil praised to the high heavens by our ever scheming and intellectually indolent politicos; sex trade flourishing like the gushing oil deeps at Cape Three Point!!! Amos Anyimadu provides some perspective@  https://www.facebook.com/Africatalks/posts/262933097092810. Some of us saw it coming; as one Senegalese griot insightfully ululated: "if you want to see a country's future look at its history!!!!" I have credible information from my sources that the accounting for oil receipts have been turned into a Prof. Diago magic act laced with phantom figures and ghost paper trails. Our politicos and elites will feed fat on this oil it seems until they and their progeny become juandice yellow physiologically and anatomically with this stuff whereupon oil rigs will be needed to drain them up!!!!    

ASEM DA YENSO!!!!!

3SNAPSHOTS!!!

So the way we live now, what draws our spirits forward, if our souls are not energized by the urge to attain projections of our own best selves?

                                                                - Ayi Kwei Armah in The Eloquence of the Scribes

A must read for any serious African thinker!!!

I have been inspired reading Ayi Kwei Armah’s rivetingly cerebral yet very programmatic book The Eloquence of the Scribes. This expository prose shines with blinding light on each of the 346pages; the kind of light African universities have not too actively provided their students yet. Armah is the kind of genius our Republic should honour with the Order of the Volta not some of the carpetbaggers who do their political masters’ bidding and literally cadge for such national awards. And I thank my very good friend Dr. Kwadwo Osei-Nyame, Jr, for carrying such a gem of wisdom of a book across the Mediterranean for me as promised. My frantic search for this classic in some of Ghana’s major bookshops had proved futile; a sobering reminder of how we have somehow short circuited the vital sustained flow of pertinent, useable, society changing information while we strain at the phantasmagoric game of beggary. I learnt one thing reading this book: the centrality of the scribe to fresh imaginings and more in the midst of chaos in society has been part of Black Africa’s intellectual tradition and history since ancient Egypt. Citi Fm was re-enacting this millennia charge in the age of the bits and bytes when it focused (aided by the biting wit and no punches pulling bravado of Ben Avle and his team) on our ailing health sector last week. Our health workers seemed to have taken the majority of criticisms as I monitored that programme but let us do some image work to arrive at some useful conjecture on this matter and frame the problem properly. I employ poetic license as I sketch the reality of real people I know below:

Snapshot 1: Her vestments are white like the innocence she carried from college into the real world. Now it is work life in Ghana. Without a car she wakes up at 3:00 a.m. for a new day. The bus she takes after an earlier weary day is an assemblage of rust and contorted metal refusing to be hidden by the paint peeling here and there in a grotesque mural on wheels. She takes four of such contraptions before she gets to work. At the hospital the air is fetid reinforced by an overwhelming pong rushing like a mighty wind from the loo; taps do not run. Inside there is a certain darkness; the nets on the windows are clogged with dust competing with sun light. To get to her “office” she must walk like a drunk to avoid patients strewn all over. And then that birth; she must “cut” the umbilical cord with a syringe needle because blades for the purpose have not been supplied. Then there is that emergency Caesarian. Woman came unprepared. She needs to shaved. She has no shaving sticks. Our lady in white must go to the corridor and scream at the top of her voice if anyone has shaving sticks; all in a day’s work. It is lunch time. Our lady in white must eat. She must walk some distance to get her lunch; there is no organized canteen for her. The routine continues in this hell hole until perspiring and tired she returns home. She looks forward to a bath to soothe the strain and her comely curves. She strips and gets into the shower. She turns on the tap. The tap literally farts and does so in quick succession as if imitating Ghanaian hip-life star Sarkodie’s rapid fire delivery. No water. She turns to get to her towel. Lights go off.                 

Snapshot 2:  Freshly minted M.B., Ch.B.  He took his Hippocratic Oath seriously. He decides to stay home to heal his compatriots. His misery has begun already. His days start very early. His consulting room at the nation’s premier hospital is misery’s handiwork. The air-conditioner roars like a hungry lion but manages to blow only hot air. Talking to his patients has become a shouting match. The sphygmomanometer he uses is the Mosaic one with the air filled ball attached; in the age of digital ones. The bed in the corner seems a century old with a blood stained green bed sheet thrown over it by someone wanting to take a piss than dress a bed for a potential patient. He sees patients in droves and often times has to skip his lunch if emergencies pop up. And then he is on call 24/7 occasionally. At such moments what he dreads most is becoming a patient himself on account of driving in the Accra night along roads with no street lights and gaping craters. At such moments he has to curtail romance sessions postponed several times already with the new missus at the height of passion. His love life is rotten; the tools for his trade are not cutting edge; his salary is yet to be single spined; he has seen too many patients die needlessly; some patients think he is Hitler incarnate when tired and haggard he cannot see them.

Snapshot 3: The most tasking work he ever did was to move from one media house to another with one sided arguments which no amount of reason however sophisticated could counter. And then he would appear at rallies festooned like a lamppost with his party’s colours with an awkward Texan hat atop his bare pate. Around party honchos he will grin and salivate in equal measure and call their opponents Lucifer’s disciples. Now he has the political post. Very easy work for 5 four wheel drives in the driveway; a five bedroom bungalow at Roman Ridge with generators when the lights go off; perks he cannot keep track of; a salary those who voted for his party cannot even contemplate after a hundred reincarnations and the friendship of embassy staff who fleece off him national secrets while the Hennessey waters his still greedy throat. He has six mobile phones and an iPad to boot and is NEVER on call. He gets to work when he likes or not all. He freezes in his car of choice for the week as the mists from the air conditioner screens off the wretched masses stupid enough to consider him savior. At best he has made a mastery of talking about problems in seminars, conferences and workshops without deigning to solve them. He eats at the plushest restaurant with foreign investors who are happy to have a buffoon to do business with. Christmas is around the corner: the hampers will overwhelm him. And sated and overweight and sick from his gluttony we will send him abroad for treatment (while the hospitals at home keep receiving newborns on cold concrete floors). And if he dies we will give him a state funeral.

Now reader please make your judgement !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   

KƆKƆSAKYI

Our kɔkɔsakyi!!!

For a thirteen year old he was simply larger than life. And he had this aura around him; a certain bespoke majesty which was further accentuated by his strapping height and flecks of grey. He tended to stroll from his bungalow on the path that cut through that lovely green field that hosted a zillion teenage feet wild at play year after year. I used to catch a glimpse of him through the Form 1 A window. Sam Parry. In his black trench coat silhouetted against the mists crafted by the harmattan and the restless ocean fairly close by. He was not just our headmaster; he inspired us. Mondays were special at Apam Secondary School under his watch. His charisma ensured that the assembly hall was uncharacteristically packed beyond its limits. On that stage his was indeed a command performance peppered with tales of wisdom and admonitions. The school choir would have set the tone. One song I remember rendered so touchingly by this choir was about kɔkɔsakyi the vulture. The song berated the vulture for its failure to make a nest and the pathetic fate that befell it whenever it rained. Our ancestors were clear in their minds about long term strategic thinking; hedging against the imponderables of life and existence. Kɔkɔsakyi’s ways were not worth emulating.

The rains Accra experienced recently showed our  kɔkɔsakyian ways. Our topmost city leaked so badly after just 10 hours (not even continuous) of rain. It was not just the marauding water that maimed, killed and destroyed but crucially the stuff it easily marshaled along with it: electricity poles, walls, garbage etc. Sure signs of urban blight, disrepair and utter neglect. I have been pondering this ever since: could Accra have survived even for a week the chain of strafing infernos of death that NATO unleashed on Tripoli? If this is what rains can do to us what about cluster bombs tele-guided by fresh faced youths (considered patriots by their puppet masters) for whom mass killing(morphed by some linguistic chicanery into a harmless term ‘sorties’) unleashes a certain techno-porn high?

How long Accra and other cities can survive the most severe blitzkrieg and march on for the next millennia? Is that not how our leaders are supposed to think?  Wuhan University my beloved alma mater in China has secret locations where the faculty can be kept safely in case of a catastrophe human or natural. The urbanscape in many ways betrays for me the architectural construct of the thinking of its elites; whether or not they are thinking in millennia or simply one rain after the other terms. And this brings me to some of the arguments brought forward to rationalize our nakedness after the rains. A typical convoluted one was that citizens who had built on waterways were the culprits to be excoriated. Sloppy thinking!!!! One needs a permit to build and other arcane, serpentine, labyrinthine processes. Who offers that? The authorities of course!!! So who should hold the can? Those who run the bureaucracies and their political masters. Not the citizens who have to deal with decapitating rents(frontloaded into advance payments); landlords who play God and rotten infrastructure(water, power, roads etc.).

Let us return to our kɔkɔsakyi. If the idea of the unity of opposites is anything to go by  this bird can teach our leaders a useful lesson after all. As a scavenger it is extremely diligent. If only we could even do that well Accra will be on to something.      

THE HELP YELP

The HELP YELP on wheels!!!!

I penned the free verse below which I titled the THE HELP YELP close to a year ago sickened by the beggar mindset that seemed to have enveloped an otherwise very proud people, Ghanaians. My research shows that “Ghana” means “ warrior King.” Warriors confront challenges; kings lead. Warriors do not buckle at the slightest challenge and extend a cupped hand waiting for crumbs to fall into them nor make a virtue of toothy smiles around solicited items from used panties to paltry loans while the cameras flash. The refrain I heard from the highest levels of government when the little rains almost stopped the frenetic pace of this 100 some capital of ours was worryingly reflective of this beggary: “ government is sourcing funds from our donor partners to build storm drains yadayadayada.” Are we children? Or we are admitting that the donors use their minds and hands better than we do? To be a Republic means you have taken your destiny into your very own hands; this reality our politicos and elites must come to grips with at the neural level I strongly submit.  Please read on:     

Everywhere one hears the help yelp

Almost inescapably it floods your ears and your very mind

Our presidents use it and ministers and the high and mighty and the ordinary man and woman too

On official cars; on walls; on TV; on radio

The help yelp howls: DONATED BY

And then smiling faces, items in the background, obsequiousness and then groveling

Where did Ghana’s pride go?

How did our DIGNITY escape us?

When did a perennially outstretched hand become de rigueur?

How did the help yelp become fashionable?

Our ancestors said: if you don’t WORK HUNGER will stalk you

The venerable Paa Willie had echoed this sentiment: animguase mfata Ghana ni

To wit: Shame cannot be the lot of the Ghanaian

We have forgotten so soon

How do we restore our Pride?

How do we stop this Help Yelp?

How do we reclaim our Dignity?

Its starts with you and me

When we refuse to be overcome by any little adversity

And look within to solve our problems by hard thinking and unrelenting hard work

Then we would realize the fine gems we have that we thought were useless stones!

                               

AGAINST ALL ODDS

A chip of the many broken boards

Disciplined Focused Force for Ghana's Tomorrow !!!!!

There was a certain psychic dissonance I contended with as the last week end approached. I was trying to understand why the bloodied, contorted and utterly dead body of the former president of Libya Col. Muamar Gaddafi(Rest in Peace; I do this in the millennia old tradition of Africa in which the dead is NEVER dishonoured) would be literally splashed over all the major global media outlets. In their inexplicably pathetic and infantile mimicry some of our local media houses followed their “leaders” reminiscent of the Pied Piper of Hamerlin. True to its latest form as a lover of cadaver pictures our Daily Graphic bannered Gaddafi’s corpse with blood congealed hair and contorted visage on its front page. TV3 during its prime time news on Sunday showed the man in his 

dying throes and later on scores of weapon wielding youths animatedly posing and taking pictures with the corpse( so the murdered man who was vermin in life was worth taking a picture with in death; the irony of the logic; utterly perverse!!!). What was the point of this frenzied demon like feeding on blood and gore visually? Does anybody care about at the very least children and what such images can have on their minds and ultimately their humanity? Maybe in a weaponized world held hostage by unadulterated violence this moment must be seen as following the script: de-sensitize all of the world’s population to bloodshed so the military-industrial-academic complex will laugh all the way to the bank!!!!

But my mental pulverization was rescued by these children last Saturday. The arena was packed tight with energized children all decked out smartly in their Tae Kwan Do uniforms. At the behest of their hardworking instructors they set the stage in a sweet synchrony for the moment: board breaking. This probably eight year old lady took her turn. She was the first. A hush fell over us the audience made up principally of parents. Her first punch left the board intact. The second  ditto. She span her punching hand in pain. I could feel her pain in my gut; wrenchingly. She did not stop. She struck a sturdy posture for the next go; her face intense pouring with concentration. Her instructor goaded her on. Then she let go: the board let out a croaky squeal of acquiescence and parted into two halves. We applauded. The lessons were clear: endurance, perseverance and will power in the face of overwhelming odds. This is what the world needs for the untamed greed that is impoverishing too many of the world’s population and disorientating the planet’s ecology and balance. That is the response the world needs to confront absolute power that can at a whim flatten cities, incinerate newborns and take over a sovereign republic in the pursuit of one man( the calculus is barbaric even if the man is Lucifer himself!) in Libya while too many applaud. And that is what we need sorely in our wretched Republic  if we are to confront the moral degeneration, political profligacy, economic lethargy, religious fakery, social distress, infrastructural decay and all the other solvable ills staring at us in our ebony faces. You gave me hope little girl in showing such courage so many adults have abandoned.

I can only but re-echo finally and in sobriety the flaming, life –affirming words of one of my favourite contemporary poets  Haki Madhubuti(1984):

                           

                            the  word is

                            the women & men

                            will love again

                           families will reappear

                           & children playing and growing

                           will be commonplace

                           & contiguous

    ps: Papaye(on the Spintex Road) please get your toilet in shape(gents). Dishwashing fluid is for washing dishes not our African hands (and for decency sake and all the profits you make get a dispenser) and get some tissue for us as well.  And also I do not get the hustle over tomato ketchup. I was considered strange when I made a demand for it and then the waiter returns in a bit asking to take it back; now that is CHEAP!!!!!

    

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!!!!