This is My Taste

Naughty girls! I always gathered that the attractive assistants at the local convenience shop play girl-games with the men who stride in. Last night, I picked up a whisper: “As for this one, he is my taste.” I was “that one” because I had just walked in. Beyond my dislike of the use of "taste" – instead of “preference” – for the other four senses, I was slightly tickled with their fickle, flirty, flighty fancy.

(Picture credit - eccobistro.com)

The Harm of Formal Education

Let’s admit it – formal education in Ghana and much of Africa is structured to teach young people to read and write, no more.

Fact no. 2 – mass formal education all over the world – whether intentionally or not – kills natural thinking ability and creativity, and teaches humanity to think in a box and stifles their intelligence.

Third, if formal education is not advancing Africa, what shall we do? Perhaps, groups of individuals should come together to think up ways of educating their own children in their own way. They cannot be any worse than the formal system.

The Presents You Didn’t Buy at Christmas

You didn’t buy enough presents this Christmas. The shop shelves are still stacked high. The Commercial Devils will devise methods to clear – yes, that’s the word they use, as if it’s rubbish – the excess through Reduction Sales. Mind you, they are capitalists. They wouldn’t let prices plummet below the profit line. Post-reduction profit suggests they were twice ripping you off raw at Christmastime. What the Sales fail to clear would be rebranded – chocolate, flowers, wine, some soft toys, fragrances – and merchandized to you with guile on Valentine’s Day. The media will be guilty by association – their loot from the heist is advertising money. Discover the pattern for yourself. December to February is just one colossal commercial con! 

Christmas for Africans

It amazes me endlessly how an arbitrarily selected date in history has become a principal religious festival – breaking through (and crushing) cultures North and South, East and West. Nobody knows when Jesus was born – do you? He did not ask the early Christians to do anything to mark the moment of his birth. It is not necessarily wrong – or right – to toast the season. It is just curious. 

The date was hand-picked for reasons of war and peace, empire and power, the State and the Church – no more. And, in Africa, we have seized Christmas as our own, and get more drunk on it than the greedy explorers who exported it here.

(Pic 1 borrowed from - christmaswishes.org.uk)

(Pic 2 borrowed from - iamthewitness.com)

The Real Ali Baba – the Corporate Thief

Double-dealing multinational corporations have always hidden their sordid affair of trying out their bribe-bringing, contract-thieving, energy-greedy, raping-and-ripping off-the-poor practices inside presidential palaces of African countries. Now, Little Big Eye – Wikileaks – has seen you.

(Picture credit - linked2leadership.com)

When Ghosts Come Shopping in the City of Accra

When Christmas comes to town each year, it checks in with chariot-loads of gate-crushing ghosts who swirl and meddle about the business of the living. They tip the natural balance between the dead and un-dead and stanch the tick of the cosmic clock. 

This triples the headcount in the city centre, and causes the viscous traffic and the sweltering heat. This is the explanation of some people on the streets of Makola Market - the ghosts come shopping!

A friend’s mother accepts the phantom theory only in half. She swears that the hellish heat steams out of "the anus of a witch".

Ha ha ha. Merry Christmas.

(Picture credit - clevescene.com)

Ghana’s Crude Oil & the Dutch Disease

Hmm, the World Bank – not quite the world’s bank – is saying it believes Ghana’s mining and cocoa industries are so well-managed and well-established that they will not be hurt by the emergence of - and focus on - crude oil.

After all these years, the World Bank – not quite the world’s bank – does not understand the Ghanaian culture where novelty gets all the time, attention and money, while old glamour loses all its gloss. Oil & Gas is already the only leading buzz-phrase in Ghana, no?

Shall we count how many times the World Bank – not quite the world’s bank – has been hopelessly wrong in its reading of the economy, culture, pulse and climate of an emerging economy? Dig in, then, for we’ll be here till Christmas in 2011.

(Picture Credit - Tehrantimes.com)