Ghana to Sell Water to Togo – Why Africa is Hell!

The Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) is considering exporting water to the Republic of Togo – this is a news item carried on www.myjoyonline.com on Monday, June 22, 2009.

This outrageous news item, which was confirmed in an interview by Ebenezer Garbrah, C(t)hief Production Manager of the GWCL claimed that the plan to sell water to our neighbours, Togo could see the comatose water company connect 70 million gallons of water to Togo.

Wait reader – this is not a fairy tale! The first of all, the Togolese officials appealed for assistance from their Ghanaian counterparts to help them deal with ‘the precarious water situation’. The invitation by the Togolese officials was in place because, they are fully aware that Ghana has numerous rivers freely flowing across the entire nation.

Togo is aware that Ghana even has the largest man made lake in the World – the Lake Volta. We also have the White, Black and Red Volta all freely flowing into the sea. Then there are the Pra River, River Bia, Ankobra, and the Densu – which has also developed into a very huge lake near Weija at the outskirts of the capital, Accra. One can also not gloss over the vast seawater that is going ‘waste’ in the Gulf of Guinea. Forgive me, readers, if one did not mention that naturally healthy stream in your village or that beautiful resource at Nzulezu in the West!

In fact, this water sale to Togo nonsense is one of the most bizarre and the oddest news of all one has heard in the few decades I have traversed this earth. However, this is Africa. Sometimes, I think almost all happenings in Africa should get automatic listing in the Guinness Book of World Records – because everything in this continent defies common sense. Please do not get me wrong, I am a very patriotic citizen.

Readers, all the arguments advanced by the GWCL official that foreign currency would be derived from his mermaid proposal just does not wash. This company cannot even provide water to just 40 percent of Ghana’s 23 million plus population on a regular basis – in fact, even those of us who live in the affluent areas of Accra don’t get a regular supply of water.

The underground pipe that carries water to Accra actually runs through the neighbourhood this writer lives – however, one hardly gets water running through the tap once every week. These Ghana Water officials are just jokers.

Really, the chaps are just not up to it, but nobody dismisses non-performing public officials in Ghana. They are actually encouraged – that is why the Ghanaian Parliament could vote for a loan from the World Bank to ‘come and study the causes of poverty in the country’. And for that, they get US$50,000 to buy super luxury cars to cruise in!

In similar manner, John Kufuor and his property-owning kleptocrats decided that they were going to import power from Nigeria – I said to myself at the time that the government officials had stopped thinking – yes, they did!

Therefore, our politicians asked the Nigerian government to export 200 megawatts of power to Ghana. Having stayed in Nigeria for some time and a frequent visitor now – that story almost sounded like a prescription from Satan. Therefore, it was that Kufuor never got even a milli-volt of power delivered to Ghana from Nigeria before he left the miserable slave dungeon at Osu.

Is it for fan that the ordinary man in Nigeria nicknamed the Nigerian Power Company as ‘Never Expect Power Again’ – NEPA for short? Power goes off in that country every second. The same way Nigerians queue for gas despite the abundant oil fields, so are they unable to deliver electrical power to their people – so why would Ghanaian politicians or technocrats want to import power from that country? They might have stopped thinking!

In addition, anything from Nigeria (especially connected to power) is a BIG JOKE – this assertion however excludes all the conglomerates from the metropolitan countries that are benefiting from Nigeria’s oil curse.

The West Africa Gas Pipeline Project for example was conceived back in 1982. The project is expected to deliver gas from the Niger Delta across a 678-kilometre (421 mile) stretch through Benin, Togo and finally Ghana. Let’s admit that the idea actually crystallized in the early 2000s. Gas was expected to begin flowing on December 23, 2007 but that was also aborted after ‘leaks’ were detected in Nigeria.

Two odd years on, the gas has not started flowing yet – and in fact, that gas would certainly not flow in your life time, my dear reader. Indeed, the project is just one of those money guzzlers – the gas would not come.

Then there is the so-called ECO – the proposed currency for ECOWAS. I am sure you can just guess how many times the implementation of that project has been postponed. Yesterday (June 22, 2009), after they got drunk on their western-brewed whisky in Abuja, the ECOWAS leadership said they were now extending the launch date for the ECO to 2015. One prays that all you readers would be alive in 2015 – they would postpone it again and blame it on ‘the inability of all members to meet the convergence criteria’.

Let us get back to Ghana Water – the chaps do not even have the equipment and the technical expertise to deliver water to the people of Ghana. Not even a so-called ‘damaging’ contract with the Anglo-Dutch firm, Aqua Vitens Rand has brought any change – maybe, because only unqualified, incompetent cronies and family members get jobs here. Therefore, there has been only retrogressive change at Ghana Water.

It is also a fact that more than 40 percent of treated water is lost mainly through illegal connections – tacitly done in connivance with company officials. So how can this company be able to deliver water to Togo? This is simply the most ridiculous proposal of the new Millennium.

Unless of course the company officials would want to tell us that they have the water but they deliberately starve us of this existential necessity, one would just not buy into this outlandish proposal.

Furthermore, do the company officials want to tell that, because of their ‘under recovery’ syndrome at Ghana Water, our brothers in Togo ‘who are more well endowed’ can pay better than Ghanaian consumers can? One is sure that some readers would be saying, this is possible and that Ghana even imports power from Ivory Coast – yes but even that war-ravaged country has better functioning public systems than Nkrumah’s Ghana.

Readers would notice that there seemed to have been some marginal level of ‘street language’ in this piece but forgives me – I am always with the people on the streets so allow me to speak their language, because this is what Ghanaian officials understand.

Unfortunately, many a Ghanaian journalist would not tell it as it is – to help change the attitude of public office holders in this country. Therefore, somebody please tell those Ghana Water Company chaps that they should go tell the marines that ‘Ghana is to Export Water to Togo’.

After all, ‘in Ghana Everything is Basaa’!

Source: Kojo Owusu-Mbire

Email: Owusumbire@gmail.com