It is only about 70 to 100 kilometres from Kumasi – the Garden City. Yet, it is the backwoods of Ghana. It is said to be the second largest producer of cocoa in the Ashanti Region. Yet, it is trapped in the drudgery of poverty. The inhabitants are engaged in the grind of back-breaking farming and by that, are primary contributors to the national cake. Yet, they are conveniently forgotten when the cake is shared – a classic case of ‘monkey dey work but baboon de chop’.
Road in Atreso at the beginining of 2009 rainy season
Several rural parts of Ghana have suffered neglect since 52 years of Independence and by implication, denied entry into Ghana and the larger world. Yet still, politicians enter the most difficult-to-enter parts of the country in their quest and greedy hunger for votes.
Parts of the District have not changed much since the beginning of time, tightly locked up in conditions not different from pre-colonial Ghana. If their ancestors who died 50-100 years ago should pop back up from the beyond, they will recognize everything. They can find their way home; just that many will find their old mud-houses in dilapidation.
Underdevelopment hurts in diverse ways. Owing to unmotorable or non-existent roads, rural areas can be cut off from Ghana. As I entered a thirty-five town cluster of the District, I could not help but wonder, “Is this part of Ghana?” Last year, floods cut off eight communities (Dawusaso/Gyegyetreso, Fahiakobo, Kobriso, Hiamankwa, Edwenase, Ayiem, Assamang and Essienkyem) beyond River Offin for three months. They literally went ‘abroad.’ Oh, but we love their cocoa and everything else they contribute to the national cake!
As some Accra residents suffer from floods again this rainy season, the rural underprivileged will also suffer their own unique but painful experiences, including floods. Unfortunately, the plight of the rural population does not make it much into the national public and political consciousness.
A journey into the District will cause you to shudder, and even suspect the strength of your bladder.
Where roads exist, they are so bad that after every few minutes of ride in a top-class four-wheel-drive vehicle, you would feel an urgent urge to urinate because the roughness of the road necessarily forces your bladder and probably other internal organs to shift out of place.
Some parts of the area are cut off from Ghana technologically.
Where there is no electricity, people cannot watch television. Besides, there is no community FM radio station (some Kumasi stations reach them) and no mobile telephone network reception, rendering the residents permanently out-of-coverage area.
The absence of electricity also probably results in an increase in childbirth. When nature’s light (sun and moon) go off and there’s nothing to do, and you’re left in pitch frightening darkness in a thick tropical rain forest, the only solace is in someone else’s bosom to play hanky-panky. Then, pop – a child is born. It’s as simple as A-B-C. Population growth in such areas is therefore very high.
I came across some people who live on one cedi or less a day, whose meal is nothing but cassava, more cassava, periodic plantain and whenever God wills, a blessed piece of fish or meat for flavour. This is also an area where buruli ulcer rudely entered and causes untold pain and suffering. Much of the area’s roads have never had a touch of tar. So therefore any person who is born and lives in the area until death, will never know what a tarred road looks like.
The youth of the area, joined by migrants from afar, are engaged in ‘galamsey’, the ecologically destructive illegal mining of gold. On a light note, I saw a man shaving another man’s armpit by the roadside. I’m yet to deconstruct that experience to glean deep meaning.
Oddly, even in their plight, the people have remained loyal to the so-called Danquah-Busia tradition. These are die-hard NPP folks. Yet, despite eight years of President Kufuor’s NPP administration, their circumstances did not change. Road construction work that began was clearly put on a go-slow no-hurry low-priority low-track timeline and might remain so for a long time to come. The big bad villain in this matter is the government – all governments since Independence have failed them, big time. Unconscionable!
In life, every now and then, there comes certain things you read or experience that are so compelling that they impact on your life forever. Two years ago, I read a speech by Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps entitled, “The perils of indifference.” Read the following quote a number of times and feel where within you it touches the most. Without a doubt, it will touch you at the very heart of the matter.
“Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end…… it benefits the aggressor, never his victim whose pain is magnified when he/she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees – not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.”
Enters a project, which some in the District affectionately call, ‘Milinom.’ The Millennium Villages Project is a saving grace for the Bonsaaso cluster of villages, extending loving help to them. Funded by a consortium of three international donors – the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Millennium Promise, the project seeks to assist, in a guided and systematic manner, with interventions to holistically improve the human condition of the people by 2015 on the basis of the UN Millennium Development Goals.
This project has, at best, scratched the surface of the developmental challenges of the area considering the fact that our political leadership has committed the twin crime of indifference and fraudulent neglect since Independence.
If you have ever doubted that the global credit crunch cannot stretch its long and ugly arms across to Ghana, think again. This week, the International Monetary Fund slashed its global economic outlook from bad to gloomy. Any cut in funding and/or abandonment of this project will result in the evaporation of the few gains made in the past two years of the project’s life and return the already vulnerable population quickly back into the rocky bosom of pre-colonial Ghana. They then would have to remain on bended knees, relying solely on divine intervention, or to simply stay put until………ad infinitum.
By that, they will remain the victims of indifference and as the Sisyphus of our country, forever drag the stone up the steep hill and then helplessly watch it roll down – exploited, ignored while we continue to build Ghana on their tired backs.
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