What Do You Think About?

I am sure as you read this short thesis, everything is ‘okay’ for those of you in the developed world, but to those of us in the developing world especially Africa, everything is topsy-turvy.

For the few decades God has blessed me with, I have had the misfortune of seeing many African governments rise and fall – and I have witnessed quite some lousy governance styles in my home country in particular.

In fact, as the days go by, our condition continues to deteriorate very fast. What is called equal opportunity does not exist for the ordinary man and everything seems to be built around vampire political systems.

I had a visitor in my area the other time and it would be interesting to share some of the comments our visitor had on the situation in our country. I have to admit that I live in a ‘plush’ residential area in the East Legon neighbourhood. For the years I have lived there, I have had reason to ask myself many times why many Ghanaians think that they can only gain societal acceptance by putting up pretentious behaviour.

On the average, power trips in our neighbourhood three times a day. As for water running through your taps, the least said about it, the better.

Now enter our visitor. She was really impressed with the ‘Taj’ type of houses there were in the estate. She was also seriously impressed with the fact that people could afford those types of property in this deprived area of our world.

However, she observed that every household had an overhead water storage tank – a situation she claimed was reminiscent of a Nazi Concentration Camp. In fact, she asked whether we were in a war situation. Although, I almost took offence at her comments, I paused because I realized that a refusal to admit to the lady’s’ verdict on my Motherland would amount to self-denial – a disturbing characteristic of the average Ghanaian!

The lady went on, “and there is a place called Spintex in the Capital Accra. In fact, that place is full of slums and irritating hamlets. There were human excreta all over the place and I think a proper name for the neighbourhood should rather be ‘Shintex’ – to reflect its despicable status”.

I then stopped her because I thought we needed to end her complaint clinic as I had started feeling depressed by some of her sad but frank comments. I then told her that she should just pipe down because every situation in every part of the African Continent is an EMERGERNCY!

I remember some of President Mills’ campaign promises in the run up to the December 2008 elections. After enduring the horrendous Accra traffic jams for years, I thought we were going to have a leader who would just end our woes with a single act of leadership. President Mills (then candidate Professor Mills) said he did not understand why traffic lights in our cities would not function properly and that if he was given the opportunity to become President, he would fix all the malfunctioning traffic lights in our cities within three months. The then hungry-for-President Professor Mills also said that he would sponsor a legislation that would ensure that all traffic lights were powered by solar energy – sounded really wonderful!

The Mills-led administration was one year-old on January 7, 2010. The traffic lights have not started working and from my anecdotal evidence, many more functional traffic lights in the Kufuor days have even collapsed and the plight of the Ghanaian road users have been compounded by a lopsided police service that only sees wisdom in standing at intersections that have functioning traffic lights. If the traffic lights are working then you see police officers positioned and rather misdirecting road users. If the lights are out, the police go to sleep.

Well, on the traffic lights and why President Mills has not yet fixed them, I know that he is now President. He no longer drives through the horrifying hold-ups. He uses motorcades that pass at the speed of light so he would no longer see the broken traffic lights or better still, he has more years to be President! When he was candidate Mills, he stood in the traffic jam like any of us so his eyes could see.

The other time too, I started hearing how well the macro-economy was doing – then I remembered that oops, nothing has really changed at Osu it’s only the names of the individual ‘sharers of our spoils’ that have been shuffled! In fact, I also reminded myself quickly of the fact that when Ghanaian politicians go to school to learn economics, when it comes to practice, they rather prefer economics from the voodoo – which does not really make sense because it’s all superstition.

How can GDP grow when I can’t get water to drink? How can my economy be doing well when there is no electricity? How can the economy be good when our roads are bad? How can the economy be doing well when our hospitals are still graveyards?

In fact, the only place I dread most in Ghana is the hospital, because any time you are headed for a Ghanaian hospital, you have to say your final prayers because you may never come back home.

There are necessities in life and there are luxury items too – but in Africa even the most essential commodities for human existence have been turned into unaffordable luxuries for the common man.

Instead of freeing the system and creating equal opportunities for all of us, we are rather denied such basic things as water, food, electricity (or power generally) and affordable shelter and clothing. All this denial of human existence continues everyday as our self-indulgent political ‘kleptocrats’ are falling over themselves over our spoils.

I know that in booming (or growing economies) people don’t think about where next to get drinking water. They don’t harbour the fear of dying at a health facility – because they would get cure for their ailments there. People don’t think about how many times power would go off, they don’t think about how many hours they would spend in crippling traffic jams. As the minds of the people are freed because leadership concentrates on creating valuable and essential social welfare, energy can then be expended on productive sectors of the economy.

Citizens are then able to understand when you tell them that the economy is growing. They understand because the situation becomes so real and obvious. When the economy begins to grow, all of us would no longer need to be put in an induced trance to be able to appreciate the figures.

And have your realized that in Ghana any time the ‘population’ of cars increases instead of expanding the road networks, we rather think about increasing the number of outriders for the vampire elites? Anyway, this is the country where everything is “basaa”!

Source: Kojo Owusu-Mbire

Email: owusumbire@gmail.com