I wasn't that much of a buffoon to have expected that a divine force would have catapulted Ghana onto the realms of comfort in five years. I was very much in touch with the realities in a third world country. I had heard western politicians describe Africa as a continent that has been going back in development in the last forty years. I had also heard those same politicians express the hope that Africa has enormous potential to extricate herself from the shackles of poverty, if things were done properly. Properly? Yeah, that is the word I was looking for the other day. Properly is the word that has been trailing us like Willy Loman since 1957, when Nkrumah pronounced us free. Who does things properly these days anyway? Even in the western world where things are done properly, supposedly, lots of things are improperly done. There are beggars here, just as there are thieves. Fathers kill their children when their wives divorce them. Children kill their parents or kill themselves when they don?t find life worth living. Prostitution is almost normal in welfare states, even though the jobless is paid the equivalent of 1.5 Million cedis every week for doing nothing. So, there are scroungers who would not do a day?s work in their entire life. Yet, they call African women lazy for tilling the womb of the earth with their bare hands, while their babies are strapped at their backs.
I was not expecting to find that single mums in Ghana would be given council houses and paid a weekly allowance to buy cigarettes and sex toys, as it happens in the UK; I was only hoping to find that folks would have toilets in their homes, so they wouldn?t wake up in the morning to queue on public toilets. Public toilets are an anathema and they are my greatest phobia. I had learnt since I was six that the word private was the euphemism for toilet in Ghanaian parlance. I wondered why somebody would go to a public place to do something very private. I had a beef with the system at that early age; a beef I still nurse. It was a public toilet that destroyed the love affair of my best friend when we were teenagers. His lover lived quite close to the community toilet, which he normally used. He always had to avoid going to toilet, so his sweetheart would not see how many times he visited it in a day. That practice meant he had to fast needlessly. He developed a rare stomach ulcer that killed him before the lady got married. I believe he would be resting in piece now; the cemetery is not very close to the public toilets in that town. He would be alive today if he had been living in Cantonments or East Legon.
As if the resurrection of Jesus Christ had meant nothing to Christians, I saw that same public toilet exactly where it was when I visited Ghana recently. The people in the area still lived in those same decrepit structures that housed them some thirty years ago. Those who didn?t have real jobs when I was a little boy had not changed their situation. My age mates who were unlucky to get any formal education beyond secondary school were not up to anything good. Some of them had become community think-tanks: they fill their stomachs with tanks of liquor before they think. A lot of them were also doing very well. One had become a cement distributor who quotes his worth in dollars, because the cedi, even the new Ghana cedi, was too weak to contain the zeros of his money. Another had given up his job in a financial institution and had become the agent of a liquor producing company in one of the regional capitals. He has a fleet of cars and can afford a holiday abroad every year without borrowing from a credit card, as I usually do. Another, a Patrick Sarfo-Nantwi of a teacher, had become a businessman dealing in the export of soyabean oil. He also imports building materials from China and was thinking of building a hotel for his dear wife. I later learnt that he also gives loans to people.
What was refreshing was that everybody managed to look happy. Even those who had no jobs produced a smile after every syllable. Of course, I didn?t have to struggle to know that those smiles were a fa?ade hiding the meaningless of the poor life they live. I punched through that fa?ade with a question: ?how is life here.? They all gave me a political answer. The political animal that I am not, I didn?t want to discuss politics. The thesis of most political discussions in those circles would be: this political group promised to do better than their predecessor; they haven?t done it yet. I normally find that kind of argument too simplistic for any intellectual stimulation. And it is too political, often downplaying the dynamics and the intricacies of economic management.
That argument, if pursued seriously, is not senseless after all. That bad governance has been the bane of our woes in Africa is a fact my little nephews are supposed to know. It is also a fact that if politicians and senior technocrats do their best, and members of civil society do their worst, we would always make a fine Sodom and Gomorrah out of Ghana. Then, there are other important issues like unfair trade practices, such as dumping, and the granting of huge subsidies to farmers in the west, a practice that makes it impossible for our products to compete with foreign products; conditions and conditionalities that govern World Bank and IMF loans; the affectionate hypocrisy of the Bretton Woods system and other international bodies; and as Joseph Stiglitz, President Bill Clinton?s chief economic advisor and former Nobel prize winner puts it: a historical anachronism that had never seen and would never see an African head any of the top world financial institutions. Of course, there is also the problem of our insatiable greed that would quickly whittle away every heavenly fortune, if indeed the World Bank was headed by the Ghanaian gentleman from Tweapease, near Asuom in the Eastern region.
A few of my friends had expressed interest in traveling abroad, and had asked me if the pastures were as green as I looked. Initially, I was ambivalent, because I knew it would be hypocritical on my part to discourage them from trying their luck on western soils. However, I managed to tell them that life abroad was not very fantastic, and that they could realize their dreams in Ghana if they worked hard. As if they were on cue, they all asked in unison: ?if life in London was that bad, why are you still there? You left Ghana with nothing, now you drive a Mercedes Benz, with two well-fed women relaxing in your back seat and filing their manicured nails. Would you have had these if you were in Ghana?? I didn?t know if they meant the women or the car. Beautiful women abound in Ghana; so are beautiful cars. I had seen a few people driving 2007 models of Jaguar and Chrysler with personalized number plates. I had also seen gorgeous 21 year old ladies driving huge Hammer-like ?four by four? cars on our roads. But, I knew that their question had not meant to ask whether there were resources in Ghana; they wanted to know if it was possible to acquire those resources as an average man working in Ghana.
Before I could answer their question, my mobile phone rang, one of those calls that must not be returned if you didn?t have a present for the caller. When I removed the phone from my pocket to answer the call, I could hear one of them teasing: ?is that the type of phone a ?burger? should be using? As for this one, we could afford it right here.? It was a Nokia phone I had bought for ?25 prior to my departure. Indeed, they all had very good phones, complete with camera, Bluetooth, radio and MP3 player. Mine had none of these features. I told them it was not my priority to invest in sophisticated phones, when all I needed to do was to be able to make and receive calls. One of them, a dear friend who had branded me a wicked person in his emails to me, for not assisting him with 60million cedis to start a drug store, began to see the wisdom in prioritizing in the midst of plenty. He later bragged that he spent more than 50million cedis on his wedding. He had rented a limousine and hired the conference room of a 3-Star hotel for his guests. Even the uninvited guests had plenty of food to carry home, he boastfully submitted. I asked him what job he does, and his answer seemed to suggest that he does everything or perhaps nothing, as if to confirm that God created the world out of nothing.
The pastor?s son that I am, I necessarily had to attend church on Sunday with my family. The week before I would leave London for Ghana, I had been a guest at a Ghanaian church in Canary Wharf, East London, where the pastor had asked me whether I was a man of God. He had asked me the question in the presence of a packed congregation, and prophesied that the Holy Spirit had revealed unto him that I would be teaching people the Word of God. I knew in my hearts of hearts that I wasn?t a man of God. Or had he meant to ask whether I was a Christian? I couldn?t have answered to that either, knowing that carnal thoughts had filled my heart on the train that blessed Sunday morning when I saw a bimbo who at once personified everything gorgeous. He had said to a spinster in the church that her mother, a witch, had turned her into a dog in the sight of men. If the man of God, a prophet so called, had given me any false revelation about my mother, I would have punched him on the nose. It was a pastor?s appreciation day; the congregation had to show their love to their pastor. He took cash, cheques, credit card donations and lots of material presents. I had a beef with that. Why must modern day churches show their love in cash and gifts only; is God?s love not enough for us all? Moreover, most of these pastors are richer than their congregation. Shouldn?t they rather be giving the poor loans from the church funds, instead of encouraging them to give forth their farthing?
In my father?s church in Ghana, the message of forgiveness was preached. The congregation was all gay and hearty until it was time for the offertory. The Holy Spirit had descended during the sermon, but He didn?t put any smiles on their finances. It was the end of the month, and they had to pay their tithes, a spiritual obligation. They also had to give money towards the construction of the new church auditorium. Finally, they had to do the usual ?Sunday offering,? not forgetting that they had earlier given in their Sunday school classes, as is the church?s practice. I had recorded the entire service on my camcorder. When I played it back later, I could see that most of them wanted the second coming of Jesus Christ to be sooner than this Christmas, to save their finances.
Does spiritual fine boy Dag Heward-Mills need the entire industrial area in Accra to build a church complex? And then Action Chapel. Where does it end? A fiddler on the roof? Stay tuned for part III and IV.
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