It is only natural that when you are expecting visitors, you clean up your house and present the best picture possible of the state of affairs in your home. As a matter of fact, when visitors arrive in a home where husband and wife are in a 'cold war', a thaw sets in to the unspoken relief of the warring parties. Visitors do a great deal without ever meaning to. So it is with Accra, the living room of the nation.
There is a mad rush to institute clean up exercises to make the city acceptable to the visiting eye. As we clean up our living room, we must ask ourselves why we have allowed ourselves to accept the dust, filth and grime to accumulate for decades. There is a price for everything in life. If inhabitants of the city expect world class service from the AMA, they must pay for it. If a landlord of a 3 or 4 bedroom house is charged C50, 000 in property taxes a year, it barely buys a broom to sweep the front yard, let alone the street and the local byways and alleys. Not to speak of covering the open drains.
Current property taxes bear no relationship to the cost of services that citizens expect, yet the same citizens complain that the neighbourhoods are filthy, there is inadequate garbage pick up, local roads are not upgraded, there is no greening of the streets and there are no beautifully flowered parks. In short, Accra doesn?t look like London, Toronto or Paris. It costs the residents of those clean world class cities an arm and a leg for the privilege of owning property in those locales. There is pride and responsibility of ownership. All our rapidly growing urban centres and even the rural districts must have budgets based at least partially on realistic property and rental taxes or it will be impossible to sustain even the cost of ad hoc clean ups which are meaningless and hypocritical in themselves. A dirty house remains just that after the visitors are gone. Sometimes the warring couples do make peace and sometimes the visitor induced thaw offers a chance at a new beginning.
When Gold Coasters refused to pay l?imp?t (lampoo, as my grandmother used to say) on the way to independence, it was a veritable act of defiance against the colonial authorities. Surely, we would not accept taxation without representation. Even though we are now celebrating 50 years of that independence and the right to represent ourselves in government, we haven't realized that we should not sustain a tax revolt against ourselves. The basic notion of paying for collective services has eluded Ghanaians for 50 years but we continue along without any comprehensive plan to educate citizens about the obligations and responsibilities that sustain the rights and freedoms we are about to celebrate. As Nkrumah said "The best way of learning to be an independent sovereign state is to be an independent sovereign state." In order to have real sovereignty the citizens of the state must contribute effectively to the fiscal needs of the state on their own behalf.
Now then, back to the living room and its centre table ? Kwame Nkrumah Circle. The circle has come to epitomize all that is wrong with the city and probably the nation. It is the sore at the centre of our forehead that we do not wish to acknowledge. It is the picture of a dysfunctional society. We all drive miles north if we are going south to avoid it. This is the Ghanaian way. Just pretend the problem is not there and hopefully, it will take care of itself. Soon Accra will need a helicopter service to shuttle folks around. The wealthy will always find a way. How about Joe Ghana? It is obvious that a number of new tributary roads have to be constructed to ease the north south traffic so that every ant, cockroach, woman and man does not have to cross the circle to get to the centres of population growth in the city and suburbs. The chaos caused by tro tro vehicles makes the centre of the commercial district a traffic battlefield and we all have wounds to show for it. If Kenyatta Circle in Nairobi is controlled by traffic lights and has been since the 1970's, then we could use lights until a substantive solution is implemented.
Instead of solving the problem of the centre table of the living room, the heart of the city, we are busy upgrading the side tables for emotional and partisan reasons. The least we can do to remember the person who had the personal conviction and courage to lead us to the freedom we have tried to manage for 50 years, is to make an honest and dispassionate attempt to pay homage where it is due. This is not the time to praise those who resisted independence every step of the way and then unleashed a wave of separatist attacks on the young government. This is not in anyway to suggest that the opponents of independence did not contribute and have not contributed to the building of this nation since. This is not the time to confound the celebration of Nkrumah's dream for the black man with remembrances for the naysayers of that era. The NPP government should rise to the occasion, be dispassionate, show maturity and take the high road in these celebrations. It is a historic opportunity to be non-partisan, albeit under politically paradoxical circumstances. We need the red, gold and green lights back and the fountain running at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle before March 6th 2007. Is it too much to ask? At 50 we are an imperfect but thriving democracy and the heirs of the first opposition party have to lead celebrations of the greatest achievement of their historical opponents. Such is the circle of life and such is the responsibility of government. Hurry! It is time to bury the hatchet because the visitors are upon us!
January 28, 2007
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