Ghana: The silver lining under a dark cloud

Stemming the avalanche of challenges hanging on the neck of 54 individuals who live by the river and washe the hands with spittle is reflected in the parable the Lord gave about peasants who used a perennial flooding to their advantage.

The 54 individuals were or are borne to a Holy Land with all blessings in human and natural resources, but find it nearly impossible make ends meet.

The peasants in question, as the Lord said, depended on rainfall for their seasonal crops. Better or bumper harvest hinged on how the firmament opened its windows in time to irrigate what they had planted or sowed.

But the very rain which they prayed for its blessing upon their sweat became a perennial disaster for them.

There have been times that floods washed without trace what these peasants subsisted on. This would leave in its wake famine and rural to urban migration, suicide, loss of livestock and lack of interest in the farming activities that have been the mainstay of the lives of these peasants.

In fact not only did the rains cause flooding, but brought untold hardship and misery to these peasants. And then, there was this dam they lived close to, in another Kingdom, which stored water for the good use of its citizens.

The Dam is called Bagre Dam, and it's constructed in a Kingdom called Upper Volta (or Burkina Faso; which also means land of the nobles).

Year after year, when rainfall which the peasants down south pray for finally drops, it as well swells the Bagre Dam, so the authorities in the Land of Nobles would spill the excess water without prior notice to the peasants. Coupled with the already flooded environment, the crops perished in drowning and in total annihilation.

This calamity the Lord said a Brahma passed by seeing what the peasants went through and counseled them - saying ‘out of their not enviable plight, they can reap wealth and jollity.’

The Brahma then said; as continued by the Lord : 'the peasants could pick a leaf from the story of the wise merchant who unlike his unseasoned colleague sold clothing to a group of people who walked with their bodies uncovered before the appearance of the wise merchant.

In that story as told by the Brahma to the peasants, the unseasoned merchant, unlike the wise one brought back unsold, clothing that his master sent him with on merchandise. He'd come back to the master with the report that; 'he saw the people he's supposed to sell to walked happily without a garments or raiment, so he bordered not to even introduce to them his wares. '

On the contrary, the wise merchant who was sent on the same voyage convinced the primitive folks who walked naked by first strolling their streets with his finery and the best of crimson raiment. With his fashion gaining disciples in the primitive aborigines. This, as he reported to the master sold without remnant, his goods.

The master thanked him and rewarded his ingenuity. Armed with this story, turning to the now delighted peasants, the Brahma, as narrated by the Lord adjured the peasants to build or make reservoirs in similar dams or tanks to collect the spillages from the Bagre Dam or the deluge occasioned by the rainfall.

Because, the old axiom 'necessity is the mother of invention ' as witnessed in the foretold story of the two mismatch merchants could be relived. The reservoirs he said should have a connection channels to open gutters and all puddles, as well as the big dam in Bagre.

The Brahma thought the availability of this reserved water, would have multiple usages. That part of it would be purified to stem the lack of clean drinking water for the peasants, drinking water for their livestock, for seasonal and unseasonal irrigation, for aqua culture (where fishes of all variety would be farmed without any importation of that much needed protein).

Also, the reservoir for planting or introduction of new crops for consumption and for cash, and many other additional benefits to the one big reservoir or storage tank.

The Brahma continued by telling them how the reservoir can turn overnight, the hitherto agrarian economy there to an industrialised one, employing the teeming youth who migrates to a land that makes them slaves.

And in that, even if sugarcane, which was not known to that environment due to the rain pattern could now be introduced with the construction of the reservoir. An industry out of the sugarcane can produce sugar, juice (instead of depending on the imported sugar or aspartame laden drinks from the foreign land, with only one aim of making profit, not the good health of the consumer ).

Ethanol for medicinal and industrial usage (example is E20, where 80%of ethanol would be mixed with 20% crude oil to fuel automobiles ). The roughage or the chaff of the sugarcane could be mixed with urine or faeces to culture organic manure or fertilizer.

And this the Brahma said; 'it's just a microcosm of the many the peasants stood to gain with the reservoir on stream. The abundance of food, for themselves, their livestock and for exportation. The creation of employment in industrial scale farming, marketers in down, mid, and upstream, are all culminated in the gains. Not even to talk about the non - toxin food produced from there, unlike the ones imported.

The peasants, as the Lord said; 'took to heart, the counsel of the Brahma. They became a happy people. Their children who found the kitchen hot and voted with their feet into modern day slavery abroad came back home to work with happiness.

The sermon, as read now was delivered by the Lord, whiles he lived in the wilderness, on the 24th day of the 9th month, in the fourth year of John the Fourth's regency.

And the audience or the congregants are the 54 individuals who share a splitter one crown in 54 coronets. It's them the Lord has come to give reprieve. They live on a lonely Island of impoverishment, in a vast ocean of material prosperity. A lot had been siphoned from their inheritance by usurpers, but there's still more to turn their lives around for the better, in the new Kingdom, the promised land.

Under the dark cloud, that hangs over the Holy Land, the Lord says; there's a silver lining. His appearance in full glory would reveal all the juicy