Nothing has changed
I will begin with an area that has nothing to do with my theme for the week. It is about the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the noises within. In the post-war years in the western world, the easiest way to give someone a bad name or have him lynched or labelled a public enemy was to label him a “Communist”. That is why a citizen could sue somebody for defamation for labelling him or her so.
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That is what is happening to Mr Kwabena Agyepong and Mr Paul Afoko. Within the NPP, the only way to incite antipathy against any party supporter is to brand him a National Democratic Congress ( NDC) mole. When that label is hung around your neck, even the most sensible supporter ceases to think. Otherwise, what explains why it has not struck anybody in the party that this campaign against Kwabena and Afoko does not make sense; that the allegations against them are unsupportable by facts? Anybody can be a mole or turn-coat; not Kwabena Agyepong.
I have come to the conclusion that if any one person can stop the hate campaign against the two, it is Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Here is my analysis. It is not based on facts; just gut feeling.
In the pre-Tamale fever, Nana Addo may have whispered something unfriendly but harmless about these two gentlemen into the ears of more than one “trusted confidant”. Nana does not necessarily hate them. At the time, anybody, including Nana, had reason not to trust anybody even remotely connected to an opposite camp. But months after Tamale, is it reasonable to fear that either Kwabena alone, Afoko alone, or two of them combined, can do anything to enthrone Alan as a flag bearer for 2016? What do Afoko and Kwabena stand to gain by plotting against their flag bearer now?
Why am I interested? My answer is to refer Ghanaians to the hordes of NDC supporters who took the party hostage, seized toilets and locked out DCEs all in the name of getting a just reward for their activism in the 2008 election campaign. What is happening in the NPP is the sowing of seeds for vandalism and recklessness. If there are people who are ready to kill or destroy just to get a candidate elected, this is the time to rein them in.
Now to my main thoughts for the week.
I have come to the conclusion that in Ghana, nothing has changed. Look at sanitation. Today we are selling cooked rice and roast plantain less than 50 metres away from public toilets whose entrances are littered with excrement and from whose sanctums issue stench from putrefaction.
Today, we litter everywhere and urinate anywhere. Next time you go to the market or trotro station, just take a look. We drop litter as if it was the most normal thing to do. The last time I drew the attention of a decent-looking fellow at the Kaneshie Market to what he had just dropped, he looked at me as if I was an item in a museum. He asked me what was wrong with his action!
To prove to myself that nothing has changed, I went for my copy of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. I will reproduce a few lines below. This was Ghana in the 1960s. As we do today, the city council had mounted a campaign against filth. They had ordered bins into which people could dispose of their waste. Here are the reflections of ‘man’, the main character.
“Like others before it, this campaign had been extremely impressive, and admiring rumours indicated that it had cost a great lot of money…In the end not many of the boxes were put out, though there was a lot said about the large amount of money paid for them. The few provided, however, had not been ignored. People used them well, so that it took no time at all for them to get full. People still used them, and they overflowed with banana peels and mango seeds and thoroughly sucked-out oranges and the chaff of sugarcane and most of all the thick brown wrapping from a hundred balls of kenkey. People did not have to go up to the boxes any more. From a distance, they aimed their rubbish at the growing heap, and a good amount of juicy offal hit the face and sides of the box…”
What has changed? We still think that physical act of communal labour is the solution. No, the problem resides in the minds of the people, a predominantly non-literate population. For them, the communication does not necessarily exist in the traditional theories of communication.
Why do I have a sense of déjà vu any time the Statistical Service or Bank of Ghana officials call a press conference and churn out inflation figures, base rate, exchange rates etc.? Takes me back to the last two years or so of the Rawlings era. Companies, instead of being productive, were sitting comfortably, declaring huge profits without productivity. They just invested in government bonds, bought Treasury bills and were okay.
Remember? You went to the market in the morning, saw the price and went home for money. By mid-morning or afternoon, you went to the same shop and the price had changed – up by so much.
Nothing has changed. In the Acheampong era, the high prices were called “kalabule”. Today we have no name for them.