Living on less than one cedi a day -- The story of Elizabeth

Her name is Elizabeth. No, not THAT Elizabeth – the mother of King-in-waiting-forever Prince Charles. That Elizabeth, the Queen of England, was born with a golden spoon firmly and irremovably stuck into her mouth. She was raised a royal, nurtured to be queen and rule the world from an island up in the northern hemisphere while casting a wry smile on her subjects far across the waves. No, definitely, not that Elizabeth!

This Elizabeth is 52 years old, the age-mate of Ghana. She is Ghana. She lives near Bonsaaso, in a forgotten backwoods of Kumasi, the Garden City. Poverty has got her down. She is shrivelled. She is educated. She is the loyal subject of a King, The Occupant of The Golden Stool – the Asantehene Osei Tutu II. She lives in a gold-rich region of the country. The earth underneath her might have gold. Yet, she is desperately poor and lives on less than one Ghana cedi a day.

She suffers from life-weariness. Worry is printed into the deep jagged crevices of her face. Added to her biological age is a big bonus of 20 or more years that simply hovers over her like a ghastly ghost, giving her a real-age look of 70 or 80.

The agony is in her skin texture – thin, crumpled, hanging on, darker than its original shade. It’s in her eyes, sunken in, as if searching for something unknown in the distant. It’s on her head – covered carelessly and tightly with a worn-out scarf like a piece of abandoned rag to conceal long-neglected nappy African hair. It’s in the way she walks – drooped, looking downwards as if in anticipation of the ultimate journey to the down-under. It’s in her clothes, hanging loosely over her like a curtain on a window to keep out the sun, the dust and prying neighbours.

Elizabeth is a mule for poverty.

Ten years ago, Elizabeth was a trader in Kumasi. Then, life turned a bad eye at her and she relocated back to the village. She is now sick. She is desperately poor, her capital for trading long evaporated. She lives off people’s kindness on less than one cedi a day. Her meal is nothing but cassava, more cassava, periodic plantain and as God wills, a sorry piece of fish for flavour. She is a card-bearing NPP member who lives in the NPP Stronghold World-Bank King-Maker Ashanti Region. But poverty has no political party colouring or tribal/regional boundaries. Poverty is just what it is: ugly, painful and demeaning. Poverty is the ground-zero of life.

Elizabeth is a mother or two sons aged 28 and 25. One lives in Accra engaged in unknown trade and the other in Kumasi learning to be a driver. Neither one sends remittances to her because ‘life is hard’ for them.

Nothing in Elizabeth’s life path predicted that she would end up like this. She is now a destitute – in her own hometown. Here is how she lives. Her ancestral home has collapsed. I saw the old rusty weighty roof hanging down on an antiquated mud-house. She currently lives alone in a small room in a shack at the back of a church house. Members of her extended family do not visit her although they live in the same town. She explained it tersely: ‘Each one for him/herself, God for us all.” Our cultural values that used to glue us together are breaking down. Fellow-love is running cold.

Her meals? If anyone shows her kindness and drops some precious cedis her way, here is how she works the magic of living on less than one Ghana cedi a day. Onion: 20Gp, garden eggs: 20Gp, tomatoes: 20Gp and dried fish (herrings) 50Gp all knocked together with lavish quantities of water to prepare a ‘ways-and-means’ soup. Plantain: 50Gp and cassava: 40Gp. Total cost: two Ghana cedis. Through the sweaty old-fashioned hard-pounding way, fufuu materializes. The meal is ‘managed’ to last for two or three days. On the average, she lives on 70 pesewas or less a day.

The cliché, ‘Variety is the spice of life,’ applies here. So periodically, Elizabeth introduces variety into her meals. One ball of kenkey: 20Gp and sugar: 50Gp mashed with water to drink. Her diet is therefore high in carbohydrate because the ultimate goal is belly-full. She eats only one meal a day. Without a doubt, she presents powerful practical lessons in the economics of living on less than one cedi a day.

But there are days she goes bone dry and sleeps restlessly on an empty stomach filled with lots of water – and waits and hopes and prays for kindness from anyone the very next day.
Destitution is a difficult existential reality in whatever station of ones life. To be a destitute as a migrant away from home is one thing and although tough, can be excusable and tolerable. But to be a destitute in your own hometown – the town of your birth where your umbilical cord rotted into the earth, the town of your parents’ and grand-parents’ birth, the town where you can locate the graves of your ancestors, the very town where your ancestral DNA can be traced with precision – that is another matter altogether. Destitution at home is unacceptable. It is demeaning – beyond measure. It is painful.

So therefore beneath the fine surface of much of the “This is my hometown” rhetoric are destitution, homelessness and hopelessness. It is easy to take it for granted that living in ones hometown implies that one lives at home. The sad fact is that there are people living in our rural and peri-urban ‘home-town’ communities across the country who are as destitute as some migrants in cities and large towns.

It is said that it is not over until it is over. But in the case of Elizabeth and many others like her, life appears to be over long before it is over. The sort of life that is lived as if one is waiting, wrapped in hopelessness, waiting for death, is a painful life.

Ghana is wasting away its human resources across the land. Children who could have been our wiz-kids – our Bill Gates, Picasso, Tina Turner, Beyonce, Martin Luther King Jn, Barack Obama – our intellectuals, doctors, scientists, artists, musicians – are locked up in the crushing bosom of underdevelopment. Reason? They did not enter this world through the groins or wombs of privileged folks.

I met Elizabeth last week. She is Ghana. Her poverty arrested me. Dear reader, there are many Elizabeths – male and female, young and old – scattered across this country in both rural, urban and peri-urban areas who are precariously leaning off the frail fringes of privilege. Fact: desperate poverty abounds in Ghana.

Elizabeth is Ghana, woven tightly into the national tapestry. When the history of this era is written, future generations will wonder why we allowed such agonizing degradation of the human condition to occur. If you are still alive, you’ll be asked why you didn’t challenge the ‘authorities’ to do right by us. If you’re still around, remember the uproar that is loudly absent at this very moment in history and tell the truth that our generation, especially the privileged minority, chose to look the other way because indifference was easier than taking the right actions. You joined in to ignore Elizabeth!

Meanwhile, we watch and wait for CHANGE to happen through President

Mills.dorisdartey@yahoo.com