Senegal – No Football Lions

Twisted, rangy sinews, a sixty-minute engine and sharp snipers will maul a second-rate skirmish, but not a six-match contest. Your problem is seeking to admit yourself into the Pride when you’ve only roared once.

If I Don’t Speak Up Because It Didn’t Happen to Me

Any State that treats the fourth estate with the third degree because it sees them as the fifth column is crude. It’s that simple. In truly democratic countries, the ‘security’ job is carried out like infra-red light. Not in Ghana! We run it like fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

Because of our hairy history of railroading our impotent institutions of democracy, any bloke in boots, a beret, a big belt and a badge – never mind whether they’re even private security – demands deity-deference because they can slap-slap you to Paga, Pluto and then Purgatory.

Paradoxically, the most disciplined and brightest security outfit by far in our democratic sparks has always been the military.

So when Ghana’s national security enforcers advertise their brawn like a neon billboard right outside a court of law, you’d expect their civilian masters to pull the leash and put them in the doghouse.

Why should our shadowy moles unleash their cloak-and-dagger 'yawa' on the streets and sow insecurity in the deepest hearts of the lamb they’re sworn (?) to protect. This week, they pummelled a girl journo and rent her clothes to dishonour her. If she was taking shots of an unfolding public scene which they resented, why not simply arrest the offending camera. And even that...

Selective Memory

"My educational colours didn't fly in Ghana because too much rotates round raw rote memory." Daily discourse I hear which dampens my day. I often roundhouse-kick the brainless regurgitation in our schools on this blog, but it is dishonesty when you vomit verses from King James Version to varnish every vowel.

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Shoes from the Loo

The droplets on your shoe

Say you’re just from the loo

Hands unwashed, knowing you!

Even if you didn’t poo

Your hand’s a microbe zoo

And I won’t shake it too

New Year Resolutions

New year; he launches out to sea

No last look at the fungous wreck

Which cast him here many monsoons ago

In no time, Big Wave sweeps him ashore

He’s read the flotsam books back-to-back

The seasons, the reasons, the nano and the bio

Conquest and empire – he knows it all

But he does not know where he is

The little legs pattering near his hut

The warm smiles where his food is fired

Even the blithely breathing body in his bed

He does not recognise them any

Next year he will try again

And push out to find his hidden Home

But Big Wave will fling him back

Won’t build a house or town or school

He won’t colonise this place

He’ll try to leave again and again.

A Despicable Thing At Opeibea House

An urchin scampered from car to car at the Opeibea House intersection. That is where an ex-president's car turned cartwheels when it was crossed by a 'drunken' man. The boy would touch his nostrils to each car window and mist it up as if to disgust the driver to give him coinage quickly and make him evaporate. A driver of a tiny box-car swept him away by throwing the door open. Three times he did this. Each time, the lad pushed it back shut. If you insult him by treating him like dirt, don't be surprised at what he will grow into.

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Tomato Movie Awards

The makers-happen in our ‘measled’ movie market amaze me mindless. You roll and eddy over one another like confused crosscurrents with your myriad flimsy film awards. If you don’t close them to a classy one or two, you’ll continue to clutch at celebrity straws.