I know that there have been dancing moments, there were Tweaa moments and water is said to be flowing in some taps in parts of Accra that haven’t seen water for decades. This is my incurably selective myopic view of the year 2014 which had started with such promise.
The President of the Republic said this was going to be the year to solve all our problems and he kept on promising until he promised he wouldn’t promise again. Unfortunately, our President has an incurable propensity to promise and so he has continued with his promises while we have been engulfed with doom and gloom.
Fall of cedi
It started with the fall and fall of our currency, the Ghana cedi and the incompetent ways the Bank of Ghana tried to deal with the crisis. For weeks, the BoG would not even admit that there was a problem as the cedi fell against all major currencies in the world.
Then they came out with some measures that even I could tell would not work. Those who knew about these things said loudly and clearly that the disease that was ailing the cedi was not going to be cured by confiscating the foreign currency people had in their local accounts. The Cabinet then met and announced government support for the Bank of Ghana measures. The cedi kept on falling and falling on the currency markets and prices of goods kept rising.
I had a personal experience that seared the cedi crisis in my mind. I went and bought a shower mixer in a shop on the Spintex Road at 3.55 p.m. on a Wednesday. I went back to the shop the next day, Thursday morning at 9.30 a.m. and the price had gone up by an extra 18 cedis.
By the time the BoG reversed the measures some five months later, the cedi had been comprehensively disgraced and all of us had become impoverished. Parliament was kept busy approving loans and when it was suggested that we were borrowing far beyond our means, the President said he would keep on borrowing. The cedi read his lips and kept on falling.
Talks with IMF
It took the President quite a while before his rhetoric reflected the reality we were all enduring and he accepted the country was facing some economic “challenges.” After denying vigorously that we would have to go to the IMF for a bailout, we are now talking with the IMF and from a position of weakness.
For months, there was a determined effort on the part of the authorities to rub salt in our wounds with the refusal to publish a schedule for the load shedding that was going on. The DUM-SOR, DUM-SOR phenomenon has driven the tolerance level of the Ghanaian to breaking point and many small businesses have been reduced to penury. I can’t recall the number of excuses that officialdom has offered but all I know is that this year has been a trial.
Comments on Energy
I pray sincerely that the President stops making any comments on the energy/power situation. Every word that comes out of his mouth on that subject aggravates the situation for me. I do not want him to tell us he is working day and night to solve the problem. Who knows, maybe he should only work at night; that might work the magic. His constant talk succeeds only in reducing the aura of the presidency.
We have had a dramatic outbreak of cholera, which has persisted way beyond the raining season. Thousands of people have been affected and hundreds have died. I had hoped this would shame all of us into cleaner personal and public habits; unfortunately we have been landed with a PR gimmick called Sanitation Day. The President is photographed cleaning a gutter once a month, I get terribly depressed by the spectacle and the filth continues to engulf our country.
World Cup Blues
It used to be that I was guaranteed a month of sheer happiness in a World Cup year.This year, Ghana and our national football team the Black Stars were reduced to a laughing stock before the whole world. Not only did we not win a single match, we got the dubious record of hiring a plane to carry US$3.5 million in cash to Brazil to pay members of our mutinous national team. The entire sorry incident seems to have cured me of my love for football and I haven’t watched a match since those disgraceful days in June.
Travel to and from the Volta Region has become a most unappetising undertaking since the Adomi Bridge was closed to traffic for needed major repairs at the beginning of the year. Since the closure of the bridge was not an emergency and had been planned for two years, it is difficult to understand why alternative routes were not built and we have to be subjected to such extreme suffering.
However every time I feel like taking a placard to make my point, I think about the Nsawam to Apedwa stretch of the Accra-Kumasi road and I stop short. If the road that leads from the capital to the Eastern, Ashanti, BrongAhafo, Northern, Upper East, Upper West, Burkina Faso, Niger, etc. can be left in that state for six years, my travails with Volta Region journeys cannot count for much.
Komla Dumor, P.V. Obeng
I did not know whether to laugh or cry when the Member of Parliament for Daboya/Mankarigu, Nelson Abudu Baani, suggested adulterous women should be hanged or stoned to death. I was certainly reduced to tears when Komla Dumor died so suddenly; one moment he was there and the very next moment, he was gone. My once upon a time friend, P.V. Obeng, went almost as spectacularly when he literally died on his steering wheel. Then Kofi Ansah also went without any warning and I am still mourning him.
Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are still in the grip of the Ebola crisis and we remain just one infected traveller away from the infection. This has been a year I would much rather forget and I will be happy to see it go.
