Ghana's Football Win over the USA

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A "War in the making" and Raping Women to Celebrate?

By Kwaku A. Danso

Football or Soccer leads some to act mad, but I received this from a friend who is a director of a government company in Ghana and it makes one sad even while we rejoice. Let me share.

Sent: Sunday, June 27, 2010 12:34 AM

Hi Doc,

Nice to hear from you. It is 6 am in Ghana. I came to Kumasi yesterday to finalize the building of our $1.5 million xxx at xxxkese ( near Suame). I was up late last night ' cos of the victory celebrations. They were awesome. I have never in my life seen so many young people in the streets. More than one million kids, some drunk, some naked, some violent...... you can imagine... Ghana has a hidden problem.... a war in the making ... Unless we do something about youth unemployment... we are doomed. My SUV was vandalized as i drove through the heavy traffic at Bantama after the game.. I saw a young lady being raped on the street. Oh Ghana... where are we heading? I am sad, very sad to see a country that is so blessed destroy itself in the end.,,,

By the way, we kicked the mighty US ass last night and I am excited.

My regards to Madam.

K.

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Dear K.

Good job at completing that project finally! We will talk when I come home.

Violence and rape on the open streets! My Gosh!!

One million kids in Kumasi is scary!! Trust me our generations need to work together and use the combined brain power and goodwill of all we know to help salvage Ghana. It is unfortunate we have Presidents who get more time attention and focus on youth playing ball than on what the youth will do when they graduate from high school or College. Of course they will rather spend $6 million of taxpayer money to send some party faithful to go and watch football, or to buy 24 karat gold chains to wear, than use the money to build water treatment facility and pump for Kumasi or Abetifi, eh!

Youth Unemployment -

K, this can only be changed when there are jobs, of course as you know, and there will be no or hardly any jobs being created unless and until we produce some of the goods we consume. And that is not easy until we build our infrastructures of roads, water and communications, and have financial support from the government – a system that was stopped by the World Bank boys who sensed the naiveté and desperation of our radical confused so-called Socialist boys in the 1980s! They closed down businesses, including one major automobile Assembly plant! Without businesses there are no jobs! The Ministry of Finance does not publish the employment figures anymore. The people like President Kufuor would have his boys fabricate the numbers in order to gain loans, perhaps. However, the sad aspect is that Presidents like our Professor Mills who have been in government employment all their lives sometimes may fail to see this! You just cannot say you are building free houses for government employees, when in fact private businesses that pay the taxes do not have any financing to operate their businesses! It just does not make sense!! Life does not work that way and I weep to see so much naiveté and ignorance in our leadership! It hurts!

Every developmental project, if honestly implemented, creates good paying jobs! How about transportation, sanitation and underground sewage, water, communication systems? One should be able to conduct business at the same speed as others, i.e. good transportation systems, communication systems and availability of needed resources, or it becomes harder if not impossible to compete in this globalized marketplace. You should be able to travel from Accra to Kumasi at average 60 miles per hour on a decent n on-stop highway, and hence only 2 and half to 3 hours for the 168 miles journey, without having to spend 3-4 hours in Achimota or Circle traffic in Accra alone with stupid police barriers.

In addition, high import tariffs and taxation is killing working capital! A nation does not have to impose 45% to 200% duties and taxes on imported goods and vehicles (that at least we are not producing ourselves) n order to survive. Why should an America youth who graduates from high school or University be able to own a small Honda or Pickup truck and rent a small space to start tinkering, designing small hardware and software, and putting into operation some new business ideas, putting things together for solutions, when our Ghanaian youth can never see a future because the same used Honda or Toyota one can buy for $5,000 in America costs $12,000 due to $1,800 shipment and $4,000 duties and taxes by government (assuming no profit).

QUESTION - When you say you saw a young woman being raped in the street, can you elaborate? Next time make sure you carry your gun with you when you go places! One shot in the air and that might have done the trick to stop the crime! This is what we call “Nkwaseasem kwa!”. The police in Ghana sometimes don’t even have open phone lines when you call them! Yes, our nation has broken down! Yes, you “kicked the mighty US ass” in playing a leather football through a goal, but do you have water in your pipes or using poly tank to store water! And how about Electricity? How many times do you have power-outages per day now? Hmmm,,,, talking about that, can you believe my power was interrupted this morning for about 15 good minutes here! First in about 3 years! It was so quiet with all TV and Radio off ,,, I actually felt it was peaceful and quiet. I could hear the morning birds chirping outside! My Gosh! I will be in Ghana soon so we all enjoy the peace!

BTW I want to hide your name an email and share and edited version of what you wrote on our GLU Forum. It’s a lesson of what will happen if we don’t pull ourselves together and stop this partisan political nonsense and false statistics about the economy, after half a century of independence, and work to change Ghana!

Friends, let us hear from you what we can do about our beloved country to move away from the wrong culture of centralized electoral dictatorship we call a democracy! It’s not working!

Cheers,

Dr. Kwaku A. Danso,

Email: k.danso@comcast.net

President/co-Founder- Ghana Leadership Union (NGO), Moderator-GLU Forum