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worlanyo yao-mensah - My Blog
worlanyo yao-mensah - My Blog


I Hope It's not True
Related to country: Ghana

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

I HOPE IT’S NOT TRUE
In my last article I promised I was going to be ‘unchristopheristically’ very brief. I thought I was. But the feedback I got from you my loyal readers suggested the contrary. I wish I could make the same promise today. Well, in times like these, when I write about issues that hurt my insides, break my heart and draw hugely on my passion, I’m unable to put the last full-stop where exactly it should be. Permit me then to take you on yet another marathon; hoping that we will be able to purge ourselves at the end of it when all is told.
If anyone of you is still wondering where politics in Ghana is headed, the answer is this very simple, perhaps so simple as to sound so stupid. It is headed backwards to the bad old days. You still don’t get it? Ok, let me refer you George Orwell’s Animal Farm. If you’ve not read this book in JSS or SSS, I pity you. I encourage you to go back to your headteacher and take your change. You have been cheated. Or maybe your English teacher died quite early. I was very fortunate and I’m sure the same goes for all who were tutored by Mr. Mathew Kwasi Bani of blessed memory, formerly of Aflao Border Complex JSS (my alma mater) and Kabore School Complex, Ho. Mr. Bani introduced me to Animal Farm when he taught us Literature in JSS2. The impact of that book has been with me since. It was from the study of that book that I first learnt the expression ‘political satire’. Yes, I’m very much convinced that Ghana is just on the fast lane to the bad old ‘Napoleon’ days. Our ‘Snowball’, our messiah is yet to come, that is if he will come at all.
As usual, I was doing a snap check on www.myjoyonline.com just to inform myself about the goings-on in Ghana my happy home when I chanced upon this ‘breaking news’. I sincerely hope this news turns out to be a media hoax. But deep down within me, I trust Joy Fm too much to doubt completely what they put up as breaking news. I will reproduce that piece of news shortly to put my argument in perspective. But before, kindly help me find answers, if we can, to some questions that have been doing a ‘march past’ in my head since this news broke.
Why do people enter politics?
Are there good politicians?
Should any politician ever be trusted?
Is the game of politics dirty or the players are?
Do people serving in political offices genuinely do so for the sake of the poor masses?
Can a saintly soul do politics and never get tainted?
If you are as confused as I am about the trajectory of this piece, just take a look at the ‘breaking news’, the pure madness, the ridiculous mockery of politics that I chanced upon. It is reproduced un-edited below.
Sports Minister in looting saga
The news of a massive scandal is gradually unfolding at the Ministry of Youth and Sports as a document that chronicles the alleged superfluous spending of the sector minister Muntaka Mubarak has been leaked to the media.
The minister is said to have demanded monies amounting to several thousands of Ghana cedis in lieu of expenses made by the Black Stars. He is also alleged to have been paid monies for unofficial expenses. For example Mr. Mubarak is alleged to have demanded GH¢12,000 for the diapers and mouth gargle for his baby. The minister is also said to have travelled with his girlfriend to a plush resort in Ivory Coast venue for the CHAN tournament played early February, and charged the cost to his ministry.
He is also reported to have demanded GH¢1000 to consult a spiritualist to boost the fortunes of the Black Stars in their encounters.
While you debate this and try to find answers to the questions above, should any of you chance upon that Law School teacher-turned president somewhere (as I did this story), please tell him that most Ghanaian students who are supposed to be on Ghana Government scholarships abroad, have been living on credit cards, even those in nearby Benin and Togo. I heard he had hit the ground as he promised in his electioneering campaign, but unfortunately, the impact had been so severe that he could not get up and start running as he made us believe he would.
Anyway, here in the cold, I don’t have a luxury of choices but to hit the ground flying. So much pressure in summer school.
Yours truly still watching from the cold.

August 13, 2009 | 3:59 PM Comments  0 comments

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On the Streets of Accra
Related to country: Ghana

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

ON THE STREETS OF ACCRA
I had just come out of an interview for the Law School. The prospects did not seem very promising. I wasn’t too sure if I had impressed the panel. I did ask if I was going to get admission. They were in no mood to answer that question. I left counting my woes and wandering if time and chance would happen to me. Trudging my way down the uncharacteristically calm Accra Central Business District on this July afternoon, so many things came racing through my already confused and disturbed mind. Then, I saw Her; in a quick flash, more like lightening. I wanted to be sure it wasn’t one of those funny tricks my eyes and mind collaborated to play on me especially when I was very hungry. I stopped, reached for the sweat-soaked face-towel in the left pocket of my woolen trousers and wiped my fore-head. I was shocked at how much I’ve been sweating away my humanity in driblets in the three piece suit I had worn for that infamous interview. I squeezed the almost half a liter of sweat into the stinking gutter nearby and took a deep breathe in. the air was stale. It actually smelled a like a mixture of chlorine gas, rotten egg and caked human excreta washed ashore by the weak tidal waves of the ocean.
Momentarily, I forgot where I was. Maybe I went into a kind of trance. The events of the last three or so hours came back to me. The white-bearded mahogany-faced man suddenly thundered “where is Kosovo?” that was supposed to be a law school interview question. I remembered that face so vividly. There was something funny about it. When he smiled, he looked quite like a disturbed scare-crow. When he was serious, the lines on his forehead relaxed and gave him a mischievous look. E must have been in his mid forties. But for his huge frame and rather supple skin, he could easily pass for a frustrated seventy year old retired civil servant or a community high school head teacher of the Ghana Education Service. “Kosovo should be in Europe or…” I hazarded a guess. It did not work. He wasn’t impressed. He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. I saw it from his demeanor.
The other members of the panel- one very young-looking jet black lady, and four obviously emaciated Law lecturers of the University of Ghana Law School, each of whom wore almost a finger-thick reading glasses, were busily going through my documents. “Young man, you mean you did Science in High School?” the lady asked in a voice that sounded like the chirping of a magpie on a May morning. She smiled at me. Did I smile back? I don’t remember, but that instantly gave me a renewed confidence- the kind you had when you were sure the girl you were going to propose to, would not going to turn you down. I nodded and said “yes” simultaneously. After about 45 minutes or so of what seemed like a life time private conversation among them, they asked if I had any questions for the panel. I knew this was an opportunity to tell somebody my piece of mind. My question was simple but I made sure I gathered the entire linguistic arsenal at my disposal; that may be my last to impress. I cleared my throat and asked “the legal profession and legal education are gradually and incessantly becoming an exclusive and bona fide preserve of the elite bourgeoisie and those who can afford it. What is your position on that?” I landed the ballistic and slouched back in my seat. It threw the panel off balance. Clearly, it was least expected.

August 13, 2009 | 3:32 PM Comments  0 comments

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The June 4 Hogwash
Related to country: Ghana

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

THE JUNE 4 HOGWASH
Like most young Ghanaians, I came to meet the June 4 celebration. I think it used to be a national public holiday until someone, I guess ex-president J.A. ‘Waawaa-DeeHuo’ Kuffour, woke up one Saturday morning, probably on the wrong side of Maa Theresa’s bed, and decided that the impecunious parch of land on the western coast of Africa, called Ghana, has had enough of the madness that has been celebrated with the poor kelewele seller’s tax for so long. For me, that was the most sensible decision that gentleman made at that time aside jailing Victor Selormey and Dan Abodapki, ‘for willfully causing financial loss to the state’. I wished he had had another solid pair of dangling ‘balls’ between his legs, to jail his cousin (or niece), Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings as well on similar charges. He had ruled that there was absolutely no sense in using the nation’s scanty resources to celebrate whatever crazy revolution it was, that that half-Scot and half-Ghanaian called John Jerry was said to have led. But even before I had finished clapping for him for that crucial decision(who am I anyway?), he had done a 360 degrees gyration, crossed over the Aflao border post to Lome-Togo to celebrate 13 January (treize janvier), another very stupid coup d’état with Gnassingbe Eyadema of cursed memory. I bet that one and his cohorts are burning in hell fire by now. Heaven knows what crime we committed that the gods decided to inflict those beasts on Africa as leaders. They will die one by one. I pray that small-headed, egoistic, flummoxed pigmy with whiskers like a wild cat, who thinks Tony Blair can take his Britain and he will also take ‘his Zimbabwe’, as if Zimbabwe belongs to his father; will also die one of these days.
For some time now, I’ve listened to people, those who saw it all happen, those who saw part of it, those who heard of it and those who read about it, trying frantically to justify the June 4 revolution and its continued celebration. Well, I don’t care a bowl of kooko or a ball of koose about whether or not June 4 was lead by Rawlings or ‘architectured’ by Boakye Gyan. In fact, Kweku Baako Jnr. and whoever can shout themselves hoarse trying to defend the tenets, or principles of the June 4. They can shout till the foundations of the Thames or the Ganges tremble for all I care. They simply don’t make any sense to me. They did not yesterday, they aren’t making any sense today and I can bet my last piece of boring Parisian life, here in the cold, that they won’t make any sense tomorrow, at least not to me. Ghana has seen a couple of coups from 1966 till 1981. There is no social theory in any book, written or yet to be written, that can convince me that any of them is worth celebrating. A coup is a coup, whether spelt in capital letters or in small letters. What I find interesting in all the arguments for the celebration of the June4 rubbish is the fact that none of its proponents and adherents had lost any very close relation (parents, spouses or children) in the bloodshed that characterized it. I bet they won’t talk about it with all the glee with which they do today. It’s particularly nauseating for me to think that for whatever reason, some young people, whose sense of judgement has been unfortunately clouded by weird partisan politics, find the excuses for celebrating this scar-on-the-conscience of the nation, laudable. I listened to one young man on Joy Fm trying to excuse the celebration and I prayed silently that thunder should just strike him dumb.
My position is this; whether it is publicly or privately celebrated, there is absolutely no justification for the celebration of any coup d’état, be it June4, 31st December or whichever. In a country where we pride ourselves in hardship and poverty, to the extent that we nickname things such as ‘Kuffour gallons’, ‘Rawlings chains’, ‘Mills’ ecomini’ etc, where on the streets of our capital Accra, affluence and penury lie side by side, where the gap between the rich and poor doesn’t look like it will ever get narrowed any day soon, where many hungry people keep tightening their worn out belts only for a few pot-bellied, batakari-wearing greedy politicians to loosen theirs, a country in which after 52 miserable years of hastily acquired independence, we don’t have a stable national educational policy and all we do is reform and review and reform the review of the reformed never-working education policies, a country in which civil servants must work for at least two years before they can receive their first salary, a country in which retired civil servants literally die chasing their retirement benefits, a country in which over one hundred young students could not take part in the just ended Basic Education Certificate Examination through no fault of theirs, (whoever is paid to supervise the accreditation of schools has decided to sleep on the job), a country that on daily basis is nurturing its prospective nation builders into the devouring jaws of the dark streets, a country that clearly has no idea where its current crop of wretched university graduates will be in the next couple of decades; it will be an understatement to say, it is the apogee of insensitivity, callousness, cruelty, viciousness, moral depravity and intellectual bankruptcy, for anyone or group of people to waste resources (private or national), in celebrating the piece of madness called coup d’état, however well-intentioned it may have been.
I shudder to say that as a nation, we are sick. The danger here is that we don’t even seem to know. I just don’t see how killing and celebrating the death of any human for whatever crime can be justified. It does not matter whether it was JJ Rawlings and the 4 or 5 High Court Judges or George Bush and Saddam Hussein. I have not lived through all the regimes; military and civilian; in Ghana but I’m very sure nation wreckers do not have any special identity. If the people who ousted the supposedly corrupt governments and killed their officials were any better than their predecessors, Ghana wouldn’t be where it is today. Our Rawlingses (of NDC not PNDC), our Kuffours and our Atta Millses won’t have had to reduce themselves into chronic beggars traversing every imaginable stretch of the globe begging for alms. For heaven’s sake, what at all is wrong with us?
I hated June 4 celebration yesterday when I was in Ghana, I hate it today while here in the cold and I will hate it tomorrow when I return home into the wretchedness. For people who keep defending this inane and bizarre celebration, under the pretext that we need to learn from our past (whatever bloody lessons have we learnt since?), they should bow their bald blank benighted heads in shame; that is if they still have any shame left in their impoverished souls. I rest my case.
Still watching from the cold (the Parisian summer is not being honest).

June 13, 2009 | 3:53 PM Comments  0 comments

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