Hello, Call Me in 5 Hours, I’m Driving Home from Work

Road Accidents. There are too many of them on our streets. Mostly inter-city and in semi-urban Ghana, but too many nonetheless. Enter a new law. Don’t talk and drive. All-round brilliance in Ghana once again. But it is not quite a new law. It is only now being enforced now.

There are only minor brushes we call accidents in the cities. The idea behind the law is good, but it is rubbish economically speaking. We spend 3 or more hours simply commuting from home 10 kilometres away from work. Let me not tell you how much is lost in money terms.

AND YOU WANT ME TO PULL OUT OF THE TRAFFIC QUEUE TO PICK A CALL AND THEN FIGHT BACK TO GET IN, RISKING AN ACCIDENT ANYWAY, SO I TAKE 5 HOURS TO GET TO WORK AND BACK HOME?

GENIUS, won’t you rather solve the road traffic problem first? Are we happy that we all work at maybe 20% productivity?

African Girl in African Dress on a Ridge Sidewalk

Stout African girl sashaying down a rainy Ridge sidewalk in her African dress exploding with colours. Guavas, lemons, melons, sunflowers and lilies sprout about on the glamorous print. An off-matching canary belt clasps her medium girth and promotes her parabolic posterior more than she pretends to know.

Apapa Kama Sutra – There Was No Sex Before Camera Phones!

So a Junior High School boy and girl had a table-top tryst, and the boy folly-filmed it on his camera phone. Big donkey deal. Then, he went bananas and blue-toothed the clip to all the boys in the hood. Big deal. Boys will be boys. Then there was a crazy, chain reaction. Education authorities banned mobiles phones. As if the poor phones caused the sex. As if you can only have sex if you need a camera phone to have sex. Therefore if there were no camera phones, there would be no teen sex. Brilliant! Now the school has expelled the girl. In her private pleasure, she seems to have humiliated the school! Excellent thinking all-round. Now we can all forget about the development we dream of. Our educators know nothing! If I were a camera phone in Ghana right now, I would be very, very offended.

It Takes One Generation

A UN police commander just said on Al Jazeera that they are training the local police in Timor L’Este to take over law and order duties. He said it took one generation to achieve such a thing.

This brought my mind to the Ghanaian police and the changes it needs right here right now. It should also take one generation, no? One generation should it take to shake off the mentality it acquired post-colonially, and everything else. I'm talking about the bribery, the poorly investigated cases and the bullying.

All education, training, regeneration should take at least one generation to change things developmentally. How long is a Ghanaian generation? Twenty-five years? Maybe thirty. We best start finding that transformational education now.

“Cocaine Ghana”, Ghanaian Cocaine, Ghana & Cocaine

Cocaine and Ghana are easy to link. I cannot tell you when this began, but it has been helped in no small way by the current breed of politicians. I used “breed” deliberately (think of it). It does not matter in which government our security system became lax or in which period the State was suspected even of sponsoring the trade. So when our elected MPs spend the taxes tortured out of us empty-barrelling about whether it is Cocaine-NPP or Cocaine-NDC, then I’m asking for my wasted vote back with interest. 

Paying Crude-Oil Tithes to Ghana’s Western Region

Battle lines over revenue. Ghana. Ten regions. Oil in Western Region. Western Region chiefs want ten percent. Politicians not giving. Chiefs angry. If Western gets ten percent, do other nine regions get ten each too?

Snow Ploughs & Fractured Syllabi in Africa

A curious, colourful tale is spun about 1960s-Ghana. The facts are diverse and sometimes do not agree. Nobody has proved that it happened, but nobody has denied it too. I am going to tell you why I am about to tell you the story. Then, I will tell you the story itself. 

You already know that my pet topic is educating our young people – the practical, usable, developmental type that they are not getting. Well, the story is an analogy for our kayoed school syllabi not just in Ghana but many other African countries.

In the 1960s, the government was very committed to farming. Vast swathes of lush land were set aside for State farms all over the country. The government did not want to dump labourers on the land to till away like serfs. The country was still fresh from independence from British rule, and the government wanted to treat its people nice.

The government flew local experts to (I think it was) Czechoslovakia (remember that country?) to study from their own collectivised farms. Our experts were impressed with everything they saw. The preparation of the land, the sowing in neat, geometric rows, the tractors, detachable trailers, combine-harvesters; everything was agricultural heaven.

Our experts thanked their gracious hosts and resolved to come back and practise what they had learned in Ghana. Before they came, they ordered some of the wonderful equipment they had seen on the Czech farms.

A few months later, back in Ghana, the machinery arrived. Oh joy! They were trucked to the State farms all over the country and quickly put to work. BUT THE TRACTORS WOULD NOT WORK! It baffled the local experts because they had seen this same equipment on Eastern European farms.

The story does not end well. They did not live happily ever after. What our ‘experts’ had seen were not tractors. No! They were huge SNOW PLOUGHS! Our people had seen snow ploughs in temperate Czechoslovakia and imported them to equatorial Ghana.

Think back to my analogy about our school syllabi. Do you not see glaringly sad similarities?

(Picture credit - escocorp.com)