Last year, I could not do a Christmas special for my readers because the day fell on a Wednesday. The following day too was a holiday so I decided to forego writing anything to give my readers a holiday from reading me even though this column appears on Fridays. It is even worse this year as the day of publication coincides with this year’s Boxing Day.
The reason for this excursion is that I had no chance last year to write anything like a Christmas epistle. I am hoping to correct this this year with today’s column, nearly two whole weeks before the holiday itself.
Already, there are visible signs of the most festive national holiday in the city. I have been to several shopping centres and also visited the vast commercial premises, known as shopping malls, now up and running at strategic meridians of the city of Accra. My opinion of the ability of the Ghanaian to spend and enjoy himself or herself to the maximum permitted by law and social conventions remain unchanged.
All the shops and shopping malls I visited were thronged with eager shoppers or pseudo-shoppers, like me, looking for holiday bargains, or just to be part of a wonderful and bustling scene of humans of all shapes, sizes and comeliness jostling together as they bought, haggled, or merely windowshopped. It is the kind of scene that immediately provokes the observation that Ghanaians are magicians. Are we really living in poverty, or we pretend that we are so we can use that to condemn public officials who must, like me, be puzzled that the lavish, unrestrained love of holiday shopping, belies the cacophonous complaints of hard times we hear every day from our radio day-in-day out?
Virtual entertainment and commercial centres
The up and coming mall feature of the shopping experience includes the clearly discernible fact that these shopping malls are also changing the architectural landscape of our capital. Indeed, with the inclusion of cinemas, salons, banks and restaurants, the malls have become virtual entertainment and commercial centres whose arrival on the shopping scene have indisputably enhanced our lives. So, on the basis of what I have personally seen and experienced before this particular Christmas in the shopping experience for Christmas 2014, I can now wish all of us a happy, prosperous and enjoyable holiday season.
Now to other no less pressing matters. I received a lot of reactions by email and telephone to my last epistle on the two issues I raised therein; the yet –to-be-launched book by Dr Obed Asamoah, and the questionable status of think tanks and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs) always hectoring us as if our right to vote needs any supervision, validation and direction from them.
I do not intend to say anything more, for now, on the Afrobarometer Report and the thrust of my comments on it. But I would like to touch again briefly on Dr Asamoah’s work, but not in any formal, structured way. I will certainly do the full review next year, because the matters written on are very serious indeed. Just a titbit or two to encourage you to look for the book to arm yourself with some of the fascinating details of our tumultuous political past. It just occurred to me that Dr Danso-Boafo’s book on President Rawlings and the Provisional National Defence council (PNDC) was launched on Wednesday, December 10, after the resolution of the court case initiated by President Rawlings to stop its publication. We need more of such published works on our own history so we can have a large and comprehensive store of available memory to draw on to improve and enhance current and future political perspectives.
Dr Obed Asamoah
After this digression, let me share the Obed titbit. He writes calmly that he was informed beforehand, on two separate occasions by the same person that he names in the book, about the coup that overthrew the Second Republic of Dr Busia, on January 13, 1972, by then Colonel Acheampong who was executed by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council seven years later in June, 1979.
What interests me about this titbit was that prior to the coup, Dr Asamoah was in court on trumped up charges of misappropriating compensations paid to some of those involved in the claims arising out of the resettlement of people during the construction of the Akosombo Dam. Indeed, a day before the coup, he had attended a function in his Volta Region constituency at which his legal persecution was condemned and wished away by his apprehensive constituents! Even worse, he knew the lawyer who had been instructed to write the judgement for the case if it had ended as it was intended to in his guilt, conviction and sentencing.
This case was completely manufactured by elements in the Progress Party government who saw him, and his other opposition National Alliance of Liberrals (NAL) Members of Parliament (MPs), the late Dr Agama, and Lawyer Sam Okudzeto, as thorns in the flesh of the Busia government, and who had to be silenced using the courts and employing lawyers in private practice to write judgements to silence political opponents, a practice that reared its head when President Kufuor came into office in 2001, at least according to the claims of a celebrated Ghanaian pro-government journalist in 2008.
In the event, the case was thrown out in early February 1972, the acquittal presumably written by the same lawyer, who had also witnessed the overthrow of the regime in whose interest he was prepared to assist in silencing a legitimate opponent of the government using our courts.
Interchange
Now to two other matters. It is interesting how the use of one word can generate so much confusion in our politics. For it is clear to me and other close observers that the word interchange does not apply to what is envisaged to be put up along the Kasoa highway to Cape Coast. It would be more appropriate to call it Kasoa urban renewal project to capture the entire corpus of works integrating the envisaged works into Accra city proper. It is wholly inaccurate to see this, and the Pokuase road too, as merely a concrete path in the conurbations of our capital city.
The same confusion and bewilderment has attended our reception of the usually good news of a drop in crude oil prices. Believe it or not, the precipitous drop is invariably bad news for all countries, consumers and producers alike, because it is an easy source of tax revenue to fund government projects. A sharp drop, therefore, throws budgets out of balance, creating disaffection in communities and societies expecting new projects, and crimping funding of social programmes. The only good news is that it may end up reducing the power of the oil cartel OPEC, whose members have used politics to disorganise our public finances since the Yom Kippur War of October, 1973.
