What do Kwame Sefa Kayi, UNICEF & CNN have in common?
The United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) projects that it will take Ghana 500 years to bring an end to open defaecation. Hear UNICEF’s Country Director for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, David Duncan: “In the past year, headlines have talked of Ghana as the seventh dirtiest country in the world and then we are going backwards compared with other countries.
Advertisement
“The rest of the world is improving dramatically, [but] we seem to be standing still. In the past 25 years in Ghana, improvement has been so slow that if we maintain this rate, it will take Ghana 500 years to be free from open defaecation.”
In March 1998, CNN, finishing off its report on the visit to Ghana by US President Clinton predicted that: “At this rate of development, it will take Africa 250 years to catch up with the West.”
I heard Kwame Sefa Kayi on Peace FM’s ‘Kokrokoo’? He is convinced that “we can never go to space.”
Of the three, the one which shouldn’t be uttered about any group of human beings is the UNICEF prediction. It is particularly pathetic and ironic, considering that every video documentary shot by the Ghana Tourism Authority to lure tourists into the country boasts of Ghana’s “pristine beaches.”
Yet, if I can look into someone’s eyes, may I ask: What does it take to stop people from defaecating in open places? The answer is in Rwanda, Singapore and Malaysia. It is called “policy” and a willingness to enforce it -- no more. It is the difference between Ghana and Rwanda, an African country which, in less than a decade after its genocide, has achieved zero-tolerance for littering. It took a government willing to enforce policy.
Yet, without sanitation, we do not qualify to be called human beings. In a statement in 2014 that should cause our leaders to bow their heads in shame, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the United States Secretary of Health and Human Sciences, said, “No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world.’’
Sefa Kayi swears that we can never go to space. I nearly sent him an SMS but I was certain he knew of the likes of Ave Kludze and Ashitey Trebi Ollenu, two Ghanaian rocket scientists contributing to America’s space exploration efforts at NASA and the good old Professor Francis Kofi Ampenyi Allotey himself , whose acclaimed "Allotey Formalism", arises from his work on soft X-ray spectroscopy. As recently as 1992, I was introduced to a Ghanaian who designed the traffic control system in Hamelin, Germany.
Who says Ghanaians are not clever?
But that is “cleverness” by one definition. The limited registration exercise has proved that Ghanaians are clever by another definition. We are gradually becoming world famous for our cleverness in outdoing one another in greed, dishonesty and callousness.
I am not sinless, but the rate at which truth, honesty and integrity are flying out of our window in the name of “political equalisation” causes me to shake in my boots. Truth and honesty have become as scarce as what, in the SMC era (especially 1985-87) and the PNDC regime, became known as “essential commodities”, namely toilet roll and soap.
See how clever we are at devising strategies to bloat an electoral register! In a world that worships brain-power, we unleash macho-men on registration centres to “scatter” registration materials! We pay minors to register, assured by our past experience that the complaint forms are mere paper tiger; they have never succeeded in removing the names of minors from the register, and never will.
To our politicians, what mattered during the limited registration was the end and not the means. It has worked all the time. Press conferences will be held to complain and condemn the acts; a lot of noise will be made on radio during the ‘Newspaper Reviews’. Don’t panic. Arm your communication team with enough lies. If the lie does not fly, resort to equalisation. Indeed, even when you are the guilty party, be the first to complain. How clever!
In this game, conscience is put on hold. There is no referee, no judge. The strongest or “cleverest” wins.
All to what end? Professor Lumumba of Kenya answered it recently: “Our creed is our greed”. Why did this statement receive such prolonged applause by a gathering of Ghanaians? Simply, he had said the truth about us.
In a country where we define ourselves by the car we drive, who cares about open defaecation? Who says Ghana wants to catch up with the West anyway! Kwame Sefa Kayi may want to go to space for all I care: it doesn’t put food on my table. All I want is be called ‘Honourable’. By January 2017, my party will come to or retain power. By February 2017, I will be chilling in a four-wheeler!
How very clever!