On October 25, a certain record was set straight when the Lebanese won a war against Israel. It was a ‘boomless’ war. No bombs were dropped. No tankers were used. No shots were fired. No one died in this war just for crossing the street. No innocent child was maimed whilst playing with friends in the neighbourhood. No centuries-old exotic buildings were crushed into rubble in the split of an eye.
The war that was won is not a brick and mortar war; not a blood and flesh war. The war was over hummus, a well-known Middle Eastern dish. And the Lebanese won; they whipped Israel! So Israel, the previous proud holder of the world record, lost. Ouch!
For years, the national pride of the Lebanese had been hurt over hummus, something they consider to have originated from their culture and therefore their property. Specifically, the Lebanese claim that they invented hummus but Israel stole it. Who is to judge? The hurt is rendered deeper because Israel packages and exports hummus throughout the world as if to perpetuate the ownership claim. In places where the Jewish Diaspora abound, hummus is literally claimed as Jewish.
So last weekend, the Lebanese had the unique chance to set the record straight by setting a world record. With over 300 Lebanese chefs assembled, mixing and working hand-in-hand around a gigantic tray, they made the largest plate of hummus. What they prepared was more than two tons of hummus, a dish made from beans (chickpeas), olive oil and lemon juice. Yes, it is the same olive oil we use in pray-for-me prayer camps throughout our land.
By that award, the Lebanese broke the Guinness World Record for hummus, an enviable record originally held by Israel. It was a sweet victory. By that feat, they reclaimed ownership of what they consider to be their national birthright and pride. The fascinating aspects of this delicacy dish win included the celebrations that accompanied the event. One billboard that promoted the event read, “Hummus – 100% Lebanese.” In the emotion-filled celebration, a Lebanese official proclaimed: “The world should remember that this is our cuisine. This is our culture.”
On the surface, the hummus matter sounds so funny and inconsequential. But beneath the surface, this is a serious Lebanese national matter. We have our own hummus too. We just call them by different names.
There is the rich exotic Kente, the fabric of kings and queens. Woven intricately with lots of love, the colours are mind-blowing and to die for. When you hold a Kente cloth so closely to your chest, you can’t help but realize that the people who invented the Kente had their heads screwed on properly. But more than that, a feel of the Kente clearly unravels the creative power of the brains inside those heads. These must have been talented artists like no other. These must have been colour lovers and great designers. No less a conclusion makes any sense.
It is therefore at once shocking and annoying when you’re outside Ghana and find out that even some black people in the Diaspora, including Jamaica and America, who love the Kente and view it as a symbol of black pride, do not know that it is uniquely Ghanaian.
And then there is also the matter of Adinkra symbols. Even the most well-known of them, the gye nyame, is making it onto different artefacts and marketed in general and specialty shops, and on jewellery and assorted home décors in different parts of the world without any indication that they originated from a small West African country known as Ghana.
It is as if we have donated these designs to the world. Since we don’t need acknowledgement or need to make any money from them, we do not therefore care what anyone does with any of our collective intellectual properties.
A major leg to stand on as a grown up country is to lay a firm claim and grip over the things which without a doubt, belong to us exclusively, to our 52 year old nation state. We should claim them loudly as our own. Imagine that a grown up acquires properties like cars and houses but does not register them. Then someday, someone appears to take them away. On what basis does the person scream, “Thief! Thief!”? We should feel the same way about Adinkra symbols, Kente and other national intellectual properties.
Periodically, the Ghana News Agency (GNA) expresses hurt over the manner in which FM radio stations in particular, use GNA news without giving any credit to the source. News generated from GNA is its own hummus. GNA owns it. They appreciate it when their material is used. All they ask for is the nice mention that the news was produced by the sweat and hard work of GNA staff.
As we talk about branding Ghana, we should also identify the components of our national brand, those things which are uniquely Ghanaian and brand them also. We should name and claim them, affirming their proper place in the world’s memory.
If we do not claim what is rightfully ours, someday, Ghana would have to enter into global competitions to establish claim and national or ethnic ownership of intellectual assets including Kente, kelewele, Adinkra symbols and red red. These are the products of our national collective intellect, the nurtured intellect of our forebears, generated through painstaking thinking and creativity, and of hard work.
The way the world is changing very fast, with all this talk about the diminishing global village, when everything is closing in on us through technological advancement, if we don’t do the right thing to protect our national intellectual properties, one day one day, they’ll be stolen from us.
One day, we’ll wake up to realize, without any grain of a doubt, that the Chinese are making Kente in large quantities and exporting it world wide – for really good money. Or, that Adinkra symbols are patented as Chinese, Indian, Angolan or Jamaican. Or, it is already happening?
If you’re interested in going Middle Eastern exotic, and want to prepare hummus, here is a recipe. Note that it’s not like your typical banku and tilapia dish. This is only a snack, an appetizer; a dip for pita bread.
The preparation time for hummus is about ten minutes. The ingredients are: 1 16 oz can of chickpeas or garbanzo beans; 1/4 cup liquid from can of chickpeas; 3-5 tablespoons lemon juice (depending on taste); 1 1/2 tablespoons tahini; 2 cloves garlic, crushed; 1/2 teaspoon salt; and 2 tablespoons olive oil.
Drain chickpeas and set aside liquid from can. Combine remaining ingredients in blender or food processor. Add 1/4 cup of liquid from chickpeas. Blend for 3-5 minutes on low until thoroughly mixed and smooth. Place in serving bowl, and create a shallow well in the centre of the hummus. Add a small amount (1-2 tablespoons) of olive oil in the well. Garnish with parsley (optional). Serve immediately with fresh, warm or toasted pita bread. There are various variations of hummus. Visit http://mideastfood.about.com/od/appetizerssnacks/r/hummusbitahini.htm for additional information.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
The WatchWoman Column: Gaming with Sickle Cells
The WatchWoman Column: Gaming with Sickle Cells: "www.sicklecell.md; http://blog.konotey-ahulu.com/."
Gaming with Sickle Cells
Imagine. Image. Branding Ghana. A diamond is just a piece of rock, in the rough, until it is identified as something precious and cleaned to reveal its glory. Then, viola! diamonds are then considered forever! These are the thoughts that have been consuming my thinking and talking moments during the past two weeks.
Then, an opportunity came unto my plate to interview Dr. Konotey-Ahulu. Yes, you guess right! It’s the same Dr. Konotey-Ahulu of sickle cell fame. We must not forget such priceless gems of national assets, our high-achievers here at home and in the Diaspora, in any effort to coherently brand Ghana.
I had several hours of recorded interview with him and came out with a wealth of information that will be published elsewhere. Today, I release to you in this column, a bit of the knowledge I gleaned from him.
He is 79 years old and is still at his game. Like some other medical doctors including Professors Badoe and Archampong of the Department of Surgery of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, and other national jewels elsewhere, Dr Konotey-Ahulu has retired from public service but not retired from deepening and sharing knowledge. Lesson? It should not be over until it’s over! We must live our lives fully.
While hanging around the extraordinary Konotey-Ahulu, I also learned his perspectives on the importance of learning HOW to think instead of WHAT to think. The two are very different. Learning by memorizing information ‘by heart’ cannot take us far. Rather, critical thinking that probes to find answers is the path to solving critical and extraordinary problems. But all that information will be reserved for another article.
Today, let’s play a sickle cell game with two sets of three different dices (he gave me as a Christmas gift – far ahead of time). These dice are the KANAD – an acronym for the Konotey-Ahulu Norm-Ache Dice. It is a cube, very much like a six-sided dice used in a ludu game. This is a game for two people to play – a male and a female.
The basis for these dices is that every individual carries two haemoglobin types, one from the father and the other from the mother, which are inherited at conception – either a pair of normal-normal, normal-abnormal or abnormal-abnormal. The dices in the KANAD are therefore the NORMNORM, NORMACHE and ACHEACHE.
Stay with me; don’t get confused. Remember, we’re only setting up to play a game of dice. To increase the reliability of the results of the game, the male and female could play each round of game several times to get a feel for the probability of the combination of haemoglobin types that an offspring could inherit from parents. This game is therefore strongly recommended for people who are of child-bearing age and are going through the motions of selecting a partner with the intention or likelihood of procreating – to populate the earth.
Just imagine if through a simple game of dice, you could eliminate, or at the least, reduce the chances of ending up with a sick offspring! Granted, that life is a game of chance; but we would be better off if we could play life by taking away some of the unknown factors in the chance game. Dr. Konotey-Ahulu uses the dice in genetic counselling.
Here are the results of (taflatse) four rounds I played with a friend during the week – at my dining table. The results made my eyes pop widely open. They are presented below. NORMNORM played against NORMACHE four times resulted in two NORMACHE and two NORMNORM. When we played the NORMACHE dice against the ACHEACHE dice, it resulted in two NORMACHE and two ACHEACHE.
Of course, by now, the results should be obvious for the other pairs of dice. When ACHEACHE is played against ACHEACHE, it can only result in ACHEACHE; while NORMNORM against NORMNORM will only result in NORMNORM. Similarly, when NORMNORM is played against ACHEACHE, it can only result in a NORMACHE.
NORM is the same as haemoglobin Type A; (this is different from Blood Group A) and ACHE is haemoglobin Type S. NORMNORM is the same as AA – non-sickler and therefore no ACHE! NORMACHE is the same as AS – sickle cell trait but with no ACHE! However, since NORMACHE is part A and part S and therefore a carrier of ACHE (the S cell), such individuals could potentially pass on the sickle-shaped red cell membrane to their offspring.
The plot thickens further. Some NORMACHEs are not regular AS but AC because they have a non-A haemoglobin type that is a C.
So therefore if I had been actually mating instead of just playing a game of dice at my dining table, out of the episodes of child birth, I might have given birth to eight SS or ACHEACHEs (that is sick children); eight with the sickle cell trait who will grow up to also potentially pass it on to their offspring; and eight ‘normal’ children.
Of course, this is a probability game and it very much depends on which sperm meets which egg at the august moment of pregnancy. Pregnancy is a probability game; you can never know what you gonna get! For pregnancy to occur, millions of sperms (taflatse) charge towards a woman’s ovary but only one can succeed in the mighty race to fertilize the woman’s egg. It is fascinating that even between what appears to be normal healthy people, genetic gambling can still occur.
So if a NORMACHE and a NORMACHE mate and they are fortunate that their first child is not a sickler, they should stop tempting nature because the probability of having an ACHEACHE (SS) child remains high. Besides, they also stand the chance of passing on S haemoglobin types to the next generation.
Here are some disturbing facts. Twenty percent of the population in Southern Ghana are NORMACHE (AS), that is – they have inherited a sickle cell trait from one parent and a normal haemoglobin type from the other parent. Another ten percent of Southern Ghanaians who are NORMACHE are AC. These figures are the reverse for Northern Ghana with 20 percent AC and ten percent AS.
A whopping one-third (33 percent) of Ghanaians are therefore walking around with one abnormal haemoglobin trait (either an AS or AC). All of such people are perfectly well and do not ache; neither do they know that they carry sickle cells.
Not knowing what they carry in their haemoglobin, they also do not pay attention to what haemoglobin type the partner or target partner is carrying. Then, as if in a grand game of genetic gambling, (taflatse) the mating begins, followed by grand out-dooring parties to celebrate the birth of a child who, may be, just maybe, might be an SS, a sickler who will ache and ache and ache. That is also known as chwechweechwe! No wonder ACHEACHE and chwechweechwe sound alike.
For more information as you and I learn more about sickle cells, visit these websites. www.sicklecell.md; http://blog.konotey-ahulu.com/. You could also check with the Sickle Cell Clinic at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. Knowledge is power.
Then, an opportunity came unto my plate to interview Dr. Konotey-Ahulu. Yes, you guess right! It’s the same Dr. Konotey-Ahulu of sickle cell fame. We must not forget such priceless gems of national assets, our high-achievers here at home and in the Diaspora, in any effort to coherently brand Ghana.
I had several hours of recorded interview with him and came out with a wealth of information that will be published elsewhere. Today, I release to you in this column, a bit of the knowledge I gleaned from him.
He is 79 years old and is still at his game. Like some other medical doctors including Professors Badoe and Archampong of the Department of Surgery of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, and other national jewels elsewhere, Dr Konotey-Ahulu has retired from public service but not retired from deepening and sharing knowledge. Lesson? It should not be over until it’s over! We must live our lives fully.
While hanging around the extraordinary Konotey-Ahulu, I also learned his perspectives on the importance of learning HOW to think instead of WHAT to think. The two are very different. Learning by memorizing information ‘by heart’ cannot take us far. Rather, critical thinking that probes to find answers is the path to solving critical and extraordinary problems. But all that information will be reserved for another article.
Today, let’s play a sickle cell game with two sets of three different dices (he gave me as a Christmas gift – far ahead of time). These dice are the KANAD – an acronym for the Konotey-Ahulu Norm-Ache Dice. It is a cube, very much like a six-sided dice used in a ludu game. This is a game for two people to play – a male and a female.
The basis for these dices is that every individual carries two haemoglobin types, one from the father and the other from the mother, which are inherited at conception – either a pair of normal-normal, normal-abnormal or abnormal-abnormal. The dices in the KANAD are therefore the NORMNORM, NORMACHE and ACHEACHE.
Stay with me; don’t get confused. Remember, we’re only setting up to play a game of dice. To increase the reliability of the results of the game, the male and female could play each round of game several times to get a feel for the probability of the combination of haemoglobin types that an offspring could inherit from parents. This game is therefore strongly recommended for people who are of child-bearing age and are going through the motions of selecting a partner with the intention or likelihood of procreating – to populate the earth.
Just imagine if through a simple game of dice, you could eliminate, or at the least, reduce the chances of ending up with a sick offspring! Granted, that life is a game of chance; but we would be better off if we could play life by taking away some of the unknown factors in the chance game. Dr. Konotey-Ahulu uses the dice in genetic counselling.
Here are the results of (taflatse) four rounds I played with a friend during the week – at my dining table. The results made my eyes pop widely open. They are presented below. NORMNORM played against NORMACHE four times resulted in two NORMACHE and two NORMNORM. When we played the NORMACHE dice against the ACHEACHE dice, it resulted in two NORMACHE and two ACHEACHE.
Of course, by now, the results should be obvious for the other pairs of dice. When ACHEACHE is played against ACHEACHE, it can only result in ACHEACHE; while NORMNORM against NORMNORM will only result in NORMNORM. Similarly, when NORMNORM is played against ACHEACHE, it can only result in a NORMACHE.
NORM is the same as haemoglobin Type A; (this is different from Blood Group A) and ACHE is haemoglobin Type S. NORMNORM is the same as AA – non-sickler and therefore no ACHE! NORMACHE is the same as AS – sickle cell trait but with no ACHE! However, since NORMACHE is part A and part S and therefore a carrier of ACHE (the S cell), such individuals could potentially pass on the sickle-shaped red cell membrane to their offspring.
The plot thickens further. Some NORMACHEs are not regular AS but AC because they have a non-A haemoglobin type that is a C.
So therefore if I had been actually mating instead of just playing a game of dice at my dining table, out of the episodes of child birth, I might have given birth to eight SS or ACHEACHEs (that is sick children); eight with the sickle cell trait who will grow up to also potentially pass it on to their offspring; and eight ‘normal’ children.
Of course, this is a probability game and it very much depends on which sperm meets which egg at the august moment of pregnancy. Pregnancy is a probability game; you can never know what you gonna get! For pregnancy to occur, millions of sperms (taflatse) charge towards a woman’s ovary but only one can succeed in the mighty race to fertilize the woman’s egg. It is fascinating that even between what appears to be normal healthy people, genetic gambling can still occur.
So if a NORMACHE and a NORMACHE mate and they are fortunate that their first child is not a sickler, they should stop tempting nature because the probability of having an ACHEACHE (SS) child remains high. Besides, they also stand the chance of passing on S haemoglobin types to the next generation.
Here are some disturbing facts. Twenty percent of the population in Southern Ghana are NORMACHE (AS), that is – they have inherited a sickle cell trait from one parent and a normal haemoglobin type from the other parent. Another ten percent of Southern Ghanaians who are NORMACHE are AC. These figures are the reverse for Northern Ghana with 20 percent AC and ten percent AS.
A whopping one-third (33 percent) of Ghanaians are therefore walking around with one abnormal haemoglobin trait (either an AS or AC). All of such people are perfectly well and do not ache; neither do they know that they carry sickle cells.
Not knowing what they carry in their haemoglobin, they also do not pay attention to what haemoglobin type the partner or target partner is carrying. Then, as if in a grand game of genetic gambling, (taflatse) the mating begins, followed by grand out-dooring parties to celebrate the birth of a child who, may be, just maybe, might be an SS, a sickler who will ache and ache and ache. That is also known as chwechweechwe! No wonder ACHEACHE and chwechweechwe sound alike.
For more information as you and I learn more about sickle cells, visit these websites. www.sicklecell.md; http://blog.konotey-ahulu.com/. You could also check with the Sickle Cell Clinic at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. Knowledge is power.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
United Nations calls for global ban on plastic bags. What is Ghana’s response?
On June 8 this year, the United Nations top environmental official, the Under-Secretary General/UNEP Executive Director, Achim Steiner, called for a global ban on the use of plastic bags. Hurrah! But – how is Ghana responding to this call?
When earlier this year, the IMF announced a loan facility to cushion developing countries in the hard-hitting global credit crunch, there was clarity about Ghana’s response. Of course we did not hesitate to jump at the opportunity – over-enthusiastically.
Last March, the world media – Bloomberg, BBC and many others carried the news that the World Bank has promised to provide a US$1.2 billion of interest-free loans to Ghana over the next three years to bolster its economy. This single loan has been touted as the largest in our history – the loan that passeth all understanding. Fair enough! “Bring it on”, we might even say. “If we’re just ‘sitting our somewhere” and someone comes along to hand over sacks full of money to us, why should we say no?
Let’s juxtapose the IMF loan story with the UN call for a global ban on plastics. Since the UN made the call in early June, Ghana has not made any significant move to respond to the call.
Here is the crust of the plastic ban appeal. The report of the first study of its kind by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) entitled, Marine Litter: A Global Challenge, highlights the growing marine litter problem in seas around the world. At the lunch of the report, Steiner described marine litter as “symptomatic of a wider malaise: namely the wasteful use and persistent poor management of natural resources.”
The UNEP report cited plastics as one of the primary pollutants and greatest threats to marine life. Put bluntly, plastics are killing living creatures in the worlds’ oceans.
“Plastic – especially plastic bags and PET (i.e. plastic) bottles – is the most pervasive type of marine litter around the world, accounting for over 80 percent of all rubbish collected in several of the regional seas assessed. Plastic debris is accumulating in terrestrial and marine environments worldwide, slowly breaking down into tinier and tinier pieces that can be consumed by the smallest marine life at the base of the food web.”
The UN environmental boss concluded that, “Some of the litter, like thin film single use plastic bags which choke marine life, should be banned or phased-out rapidly everywhere – there is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere."
On the same day, to mark the first United Nations World Oceans Day, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added his voice to the call. He asserted that human activities are taking a "terrible toll" on the world's oceans and seas.
"Vulnerable marine ecosystems, such as corals, and important fisheries are being damaged by over-exploitation, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, destructive fishing practices, invasive alien species and marine pollution, especially from land-based sources," he said.
Clearly, the world’s super body, the United Nations, is alarmed about plastics. And we must too. Research is being conducted worldwide about the plastic menace and the findings are frightening. For instance, a study of fulmar seabirds in the North Sea found that 95 percent of them had plastic in their stomachs.
Of course, we don’t need the United Nations or any research to tell us this. We know, as a country, that we must ban non-biodegradable plastics – the ones which have over-powered our entire landscape – from backyards to town centres, from markets to police stations, from cities to villages, and from rivers to the mighty Atlantic Ocean.
Some countries have taken the initiative to ban the non-biodegradable single-use plastics, the type we over-use and toss about mindlessly. Some African countries including South Africa, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya have taken varied bold initiatives. But Ghana is silent and periodically jokes about recycling plastics.
In the first week of August, a group of scientists set out on a journey from the US state of California to examine what is known as “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” The Patch is estimated to be about six times the size of Ghana, and growing. Here is how it formed. When plastics make it into the sea, they float and swim and dance with the sea currents. Later, after breaking down into tinier pieces, they band together in one area – and stay put. So the years of grand global plastic swimming has created a floating island in the Pacific Ocean.
Knowing comes from seeing, feeling, experiencing, awareness, familiarity, recognizing, understanding, comprehension, discerning, appreciating and grasping the essence of something. Plastic use and the resulting menace have reached that tipping point of insanity where we all know that it must be banned. So I’ll cry myself hoarse about the need to ban plastics in Ghana until I can cry no more. You must too.
Fact: Rivers and water bodies are forced to swallow down plastics. A walk by our beaches indicates that nature abhors filth. The sea, in its maturity and wisdom, vomits out plastics and lays down the heavy burden at the beaches.
I’m a ‘fishtarian’ (I eat fish and not meat.) Plastics are not meant to be consumed by any living being. But since plastics are the most common form of ocean litter (as well as litter in our rivers and water bodies), and are invariably eaten by fishes, what are the chances that the fish I eat and you eat and we eat is free of whatever chemicals are in the plastic debris eaten by fishes? I shudder to think and dwell on this matter at meal time.
So when will Ghana respond to the call of the UN for a global plastic ban? Here is my guess; in fact, my conviction. Plastics is a business. Big business! Big money! So those who make money from plastics would lobby against a ban.
How I wish I could be a fly on the walls of the Castle, at the very seat of government and in high-place ministerial offices and meetings to eavesdrop on the sheer magnitude of lobbying that goes on to thwart any dreams of banning plastics! An expressed, unbending political will of government to do otherwise to save our land and waters from plastics will not hurt.
We must have this national conversation on the way forward instead of burying our heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich. Living in denial about plastics will not eradicate the menace. It will only magnify the destructions of plastics and complicate the solution.
My fascination heightens when I see plastics fly around like birds. They are the flying objects of our 52 year old civilization. The difference is that plastics tend to land more often than birds. They take off suddenly on any little push by the wind, hop around for a little while and then make landing anywhere – on streets, in gutters, rivers, on roof tops, and on electrical or telephone wires. They don’t care where they land because they are helpless without the wind.
Remember, the next time you handle plastics (usually, mindlessly) that all the plastic you over-use and toss about might last forever, long long after you’ve exited (escaped?) this earth’s! You, me, we all are contributing to this menace. It is your plastics, my plastics, our plastics that fly around and choke gutters, water-ways, rivers, farmlands and litter the streets, hang on trees and electrical wires.
When earlier this year, the IMF announced a loan facility to cushion developing countries in the hard-hitting global credit crunch, there was clarity about Ghana’s response. Of course we did not hesitate to jump at the opportunity – over-enthusiastically.
Last March, the world media – Bloomberg, BBC and many others carried the news that the World Bank has promised to provide a US$1.2 billion of interest-free loans to Ghana over the next three years to bolster its economy. This single loan has been touted as the largest in our history – the loan that passeth all understanding. Fair enough! “Bring it on”, we might even say. “If we’re just ‘sitting our somewhere” and someone comes along to hand over sacks full of money to us, why should we say no?
Let’s juxtapose the IMF loan story with the UN call for a global ban on plastics. Since the UN made the call in early June, Ghana has not made any significant move to respond to the call.
Here is the crust of the plastic ban appeal. The report of the first study of its kind by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) entitled, Marine Litter: A Global Challenge, highlights the growing marine litter problem in seas around the world. At the lunch of the report, Steiner described marine litter as “symptomatic of a wider malaise: namely the wasteful use and persistent poor management of natural resources.”
The UNEP report cited plastics as one of the primary pollutants and greatest threats to marine life. Put bluntly, plastics are killing living creatures in the worlds’ oceans.
“Plastic – especially plastic bags and PET (i.e. plastic) bottles – is the most pervasive type of marine litter around the world, accounting for over 80 percent of all rubbish collected in several of the regional seas assessed. Plastic debris is accumulating in terrestrial and marine environments worldwide, slowly breaking down into tinier and tinier pieces that can be consumed by the smallest marine life at the base of the food web.”
The UN environmental boss concluded that, “Some of the litter, like thin film single use plastic bags which choke marine life, should be banned or phased-out rapidly everywhere – there is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere."
On the same day, to mark the first United Nations World Oceans Day, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added his voice to the call. He asserted that human activities are taking a "terrible toll" on the world's oceans and seas.
"Vulnerable marine ecosystems, such as corals, and important fisheries are being damaged by over-exploitation, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, destructive fishing practices, invasive alien species and marine pollution, especially from land-based sources," he said.
Clearly, the world’s super body, the United Nations, is alarmed about plastics. And we must too. Research is being conducted worldwide about the plastic menace and the findings are frightening. For instance, a study of fulmar seabirds in the North Sea found that 95 percent of them had plastic in their stomachs.
Of course, we don’t need the United Nations or any research to tell us this. We know, as a country, that we must ban non-biodegradable plastics – the ones which have over-powered our entire landscape – from backyards to town centres, from markets to police stations, from cities to villages, and from rivers to the mighty Atlantic Ocean.
Some countries have taken the initiative to ban the non-biodegradable single-use plastics, the type we over-use and toss about mindlessly. Some African countries including South Africa, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya have taken varied bold initiatives. But Ghana is silent and periodically jokes about recycling plastics.
In the first week of August, a group of scientists set out on a journey from the US state of California to examine what is known as “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” The Patch is estimated to be about six times the size of Ghana, and growing. Here is how it formed. When plastics make it into the sea, they float and swim and dance with the sea currents. Later, after breaking down into tinier pieces, they band together in one area – and stay put. So the years of grand global plastic swimming has created a floating island in the Pacific Ocean.
Knowing comes from seeing, feeling, experiencing, awareness, familiarity, recognizing, understanding, comprehension, discerning, appreciating and grasping the essence of something. Plastic use and the resulting menace have reached that tipping point of insanity where we all know that it must be banned. So I’ll cry myself hoarse about the need to ban plastics in Ghana until I can cry no more. You must too.
Fact: Rivers and water bodies are forced to swallow down plastics. A walk by our beaches indicates that nature abhors filth. The sea, in its maturity and wisdom, vomits out plastics and lays down the heavy burden at the beaches.
I’m a ‘fishtarian’ (I eat fish and not meat.) Plastics are not meant to be consumed by any living being. But since plastics are the most common form of ocean litter (as well as litter in our rivers and water bodies), and are invariably eaten by fishes, what are the chances that the fish I eat and you eat and we eat is free of whatever chemicals are in the plastic debris eaten by fishes? I shudder to think and dwell on this matter at meal time.
So when will Ghana respond to the call of the UN for a global plastic ban? Here is my guess; in fact, my conviction. Plastics is a business. Big business! Big money! So those who make money from plastics would lobby against a ban.
How I wish I could be a fly on the walls of the Castle, at the very seat of government and in high-place ministerial offices and meetings to eavesdrop on the sheer magnitude of lobbying that goes on to thwart any dreams of banning plastics! An expressed, unbending political will of government to do otherwise to save our land and waters from plastics will not hurt.
We must have this national conversation on the way forward instead of burying our heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich. Living in denial about plastics will not eradicate the menace. It will only magnify the destructions of plastics and complicate the solution.
My fascination heightens when I see plastics fly around like birds. They are the flying objects of our 52 year old civilization. The difference is that plastics tend to land more often than birds. They take off suddenly on any little push by the wind, hop around for a little while and then make landing anywhere – on streets, in gutters, rivers, on roof tops, and on electrical or telephone wires. They don’t care where they land because they are helpless without the wind.
Remember, the next time you handle plastics (usually, mindlessly) that all the plastic you over-use and toss about might last forever, long long after you’ve exited (escaped?) this earth’s! You, me, we all are contributing to this menace. It is your plastics, my plastics, our plastics that fly around and choke gutters, water-ways, rivers, farmlands and litter the streets, hang on trees and electrical wires.
For women only, and the men who love us
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month
This is a girlfriend chat – a conversation between one woman and other women. The men who read this should pass on the message to all the women in their lives who are 40 years of age and above. October is being celebrated throughout the world as Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It is a unique chance to remind all women of the importance of checking out their breasts for lumps and any other abnormalities.
What you don’t know can kill you. That explains why a biopsy is always better than an autopsy. Both seek to find out the cause of diseases. But whilst a biopsy is conducted from a problem solving mind-set, an autopsy finds out when it is too late. Similarly, early detection of breast cancer increases the chance of saving the breasts and of saving life. Statistics show that black women are twice as likely as white women to get breast cancer. Sister friend, you and I are as black as black can be so the chances of breast cancer knocking rudely at our life’s door is pretty high.
If you are the conservative type and therefore uncomfortable to use the word breast, you could simply refer to them as your ‘girls’. These girls are our precious assets and we must take very good care of them like we would take care of any other treasure. When they are ignored, they are capable of leaving misery in their wake, the kind of misery which passeth all understanding. We should therefore take care of our breasts by checking them regularly, so we can detect abnormalities. Ask your female friends and loved ones: “Have you had your girls checked lately?”
Here is a story from my childhood. I witnessed breast cancer in all its bitterness when I was just a little girl, at about ten years old. My grandfather’s younger sister was literally eaten away by the unseen monster. I didn’t know what it was by name, but knew that a disease was slowly but surely burrowing its sharp deadly teeth into my grandaunt’s chest. It felt like having an unwelcome visitor in your home, an invasion of some sort – and the visitor stays on with vengeance, until mission is accomplished – whatever it determines the mission to be.
Those days, breast cancer was a taboo subject. A respectable person would not talk about the breast in public; it was indecent language. It was as if it was more dignifying to die of breast cancer than to talk about a diseased breast! Breasts belong to the category of body parts known as ‘private.’ They are so private that they are usually shrouded in secrecy. These are mostly reproductive organs that are sources of pleasure in secrecy so one was (is?) required to shy away from them in public discourse. But fortunately, that was then; and this is now. We can and must talk about breast cancer.
My grandaunt’s story happened many yesteryears ago but because of the horrific nature of the experience, the memories are still vivid as if it happened only in a recent yesteryear. Some memories are so deep-seated that you don’t need a photograph or any form of recording to capture them into permanency. I bore witness to breast cancer at that young age and therefore froze the memory, forever.
The monster entered via one of her breast and dug in; or, it was already inside, unseen, but peaked outside to announce its unholy presence. After it had made my grandaunt’s chest its home, it dug deeper by spreading into the other breast, chewing other things in its path on the deadly but sneaky viral journey. Then came maggots, as if they were the unholy children of the mature breast cancer! The breasts shrivelled, as they should under such a trying ordeal.
Sometime during the breast cancer drama, my grandfather travelled with his kid sister to a far away place to seek herbal treatment. I recall that they returned with some concoctions which were regularly slapped onto the festering cancer crevice. As if in defiance of African medical concoctions, the cancer continued to spread, jubilantly. Besides, medical advancement to fight breast cancer was at the time, at best, rudimentary.
In the midst of all those uncertainties, the rude breast cancer trampled on the entire extended family, taking away my grandaunt’s dignity in the process. There was so much moaning and groaning, amidst grinding of teeth of biblical proportions. My grandaunt was a smallish woman. By the time she finally died, she was not left with much of a body. Pain and misery can suck away at the flesh, beyond measure.
That was then, several yesteryears ago. Those days, when diagnosed with breast cancer, you had the option of having the affected breast surgically removed on the wings of prayers that the cancer was seated only in that particular breast. Those days, there was no chemotherapy, radiotherapy or any of the other screening methods available today. When diagnosed, you were also handed a death sentence par-excellence. The cancer had the power to embark on a relentless and insidious grand journey of destruction and the attendant eventful and definite painful death.
While chemotherapy serves the purpose of searching the blood stream to find cancer cells which are running amok to destroy them, radiotherapy is often used after surgery to focus high-energy beams in the affected area to stop any cancer cells dead in their tracks.
Those days, there were no methods to screen for breast cancer. More often than not, a patient found out when it was too late and the cancer had already gained ground, at a point of no return. But today, there are screening methods – to poke and probe to find abnormal growths in the breasts that require further investigations.
This is the best time to be alive. Unlike during my grandaunt’s days, we can be our own breast health advocates. On our own, we can do breast self-examinations. The breasts are ours and we must know them intimately. With self-breast knowledge, we can tell when any changes occur. These days, there is also mammogram, an x-ray of the breast which can show abnormal growths. In short, these days, we can save our breasts but best of all, we can save our lives and prevent breast cancer – if only it is diagnosed early, in a treatable form.
But if one is diagnosed a bit late and had to lose the breast, hope is not lost. Those days, when you lost your breast to cancer, you could only manage by arranging some odd fillers as a make-belief breast to prevent a flat chest and give the appearance of femininity. But these days, there are well-engineered well-shaped state-of-the-art artificial look-alike breasts that one could simply stick into a brazier to conceal a missing breast. Not bad at all for aesthetics.
But we only win through early diagnosis. Late diagnosis hands in the same ugly death sentence that breast cancer meted out to my grandaunt many yesteryears ago. That is unnecessary these days. Not for you; not for me; not for anyone.
This is a girlfriend chat – a conversation between one woman and other women. The men who read this should pass on the message to all the women in their lives who are 40 years of age and above. October is being celebrated throughout the world as Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It is a unique chance to remind all women of the importance of checking out their breasts for lumps and any other abnormalities.
What you don’t know can kill you. That explains why a biopsy is always better than an autopsy. Both seek to find out the cause of diseases. But whilst a biopsy is conducted from a problem solving mind-set, an autopsy finds out when it is too late. Similarly, early detection of breast cancer increases the chance of saving the breasts and of saving life. Statistics show that black women are twice as likely as white women to get breast cancer. Sister friend, you and I are as black as black can be so the chances of breast cancer knocking rudely at our life’s door is pretty high.
If you are the conservative type and therefore uncomfortable to use the word breast, you could simply refer to them as your ‘girls’. These girls are our precious assets and we must take very good care of them like we would take care of any other treasure. When they are ignored, they are capable of leaving misery in their wake, the kind of misery which passeth all understanding. We should therefore take care of our breasts by checking them regularly, so we can detect abnormalities. Ask your female friends and loved ones: “Have you had your girls checked lately?”
Here is a story from my childhood. I witnessed breast cancer in all its bitterness when I was just a little girl, at about ten years old. My grandfather’s younger sister was literally eaten away by the unseen monster. I didn’t know what it was by name, but knew that a disease was slowly but surely burrowing its sharp deadly teeth into my grandaunt’s chest. It felt like having an unwelcome visitor in your home, an invasion of some sort – and the visitor stays on with vengeance, until mission is accomplished – whatever it determines the mission to be.
Those days, breast cancer was a taboo subject. A respectable person would not talk about the breast in public; it was indecent language. It was as if it was more dignifying to die of breast cancer than to talk about a diseased breast! Breasts belong to the category of body parts known as ‘private.’ They are so private that they are usually shrouded in secrecy. These are mostly reproductive organs that are sources of pleasure in secrecy so one was (is?) required to shy away from them in public discourse. But fortunately, that was then; and this is now. We can and must talk about breast cancer.
My grandaunt’s story happened many yesteryears ago but because of the horrific nature of the experience, the memories are still vivid as if it happened only in a recent yesteryear. Some memories are so deep-seated that you don’t need a photograph or any form of recording to capture them into permanency. I bore witness to breast cancer at that young age and therefore froze the memory, forever.
The monster entered via one of her breast and dug in; or, it was already inside, unseen, but peaked outside to announce its unholy presence. After it had made my grandaunt’s chest its home, it dug deeper by spreading into the other breast, chewing other things in its path on the deadly but sneaky viral journey. Then came maggots, as if they were the unholy children of the mature breast cancer! The breasts shrivelled, as they should under such a trying ordeal.
Sometime during the breast cancer drama, my grandfather travelled with his kid sister to a far away place to seek herbal treatment. I recall that they returned with some concoctions which were regularly slapped onto the festering cancer crevice. As if in defiance of African medical concoctions, the cancer continued to spread, jubilantly. Besides, medical advancement to fight breast cancer was at the time, at best, rudimentary.
In the midst of all those uncertainties, the rude breast cancer trampled on the entire extended family, taking away my grandaunt’s dignity in the process. There was so much moaning and groaning, amidst grinding of teeth of biblical proportions. My grandaunt was a smallish woman. By the time she finally died, she was not left with much of a body. Pain and misery can suck away at the flesh, beyond measure.
That was then, several yesteryears ago. Those days, when diagnosed with breast cancer, you had the option of having the affected breast surgically removed on the wings of prayers that the cancer was seated only in that particular breast. Those days, there was no chemotherapy, radiotherapy or any of the other screening methods available today. When diagnosed, you were also handed a death sentence par-excellence. The cancer had the power to embark on a relentless and insidious grand journey of destruction and the attendant eventful and definite painful death.
While chemotherapy serves the purpose of searching the blood stream to find cancer cells which are running amok to destroy them, radiotherapy is often used after surgery to focus high-energy beams in the affected area to stop any cancer cells dead in their tracks.
Those days, there were no methods to screen for breast cancer. More often than not, a patient found out when it was too late and the cancer had already gained ground, at a point of no return. But today, there are screening methods – to poke and probe to find abnormal growths in the breasts that require further investigations.
This is the best time to be alive. Unlike during my grandaunt’s days, we can be our own breast health advocates. On our own, we can do breast self-examinations. The breasts are ours and we must know them intimately. With self-breast knowledge, we can tell when any changes occur. These days, there is also mammogram, an x-ray of the breast which can show abnormal growths. In short, these days, we can save our breasts but best of all, we can save our lives and prevent breast cancer – if only it is diagnosed early, in a treatable form.
But if one is diagnosed a bit late and had to lose the breast, hope is not lost. Those days, when you lost your breast to cancer, you could only manage by arranging some odd fillers as a make-belief breast to prevent a flat chest and give the appearance of femininity. But these days, there are well-engineered well-shaped state-of-the-art artificial look-alike breasts that one could simply stick into a brazier to conceal a missing breast. Not bad at all for aesthetics.
But we only win through early diagnosis. Late diagnosis hands in the same ugly death sentence that breast cancer meted out to my grandaunt many yesteryears ago. That is unnecessary these days. Not for you; not for me; not for anyone.
Nkrumah’s Show-Boyism Lives On
Is it just me or it’s normal for a song to play over and over in ones head, for no reason at all? In the past week, one particular song has been playing in my micro-sized coconut-head. If you know the tune, sing the danceable show-boy praise song. Shake your body (shoulders, legs and all your members) as you sing it repeatedly (even if you dislike the man). “Nkrumah eh, Nkrumah Show Boy. Nkrumah eh, Nkrumah Show Boy. I want to see you, Kwame Nkrumah Show Boy.”
As they say in Hollywood, “There’s no business like Show Business!” President Kwame Nkrumah was a ‘Show Boy’ from cradle to grave, from Mama Nyaniba’s back in a village in the middle of nowhere, to iconic stature as the most celebrated African of the last century and clearly, beyond.
I saw the man once. Well, not really! I was a little girl, barely above the ground in height with a Young Pioneer scarf tied around my innocent littleneck, crowded by taller older children by a village roadside. We had been lined up to wave miniature Ghana flags at the Osagyefo as his convoy zoomed past. I think I saw him. Not a chance! The ‘Show Boy’ was larger than life and I, a little inconsequential village girl, could not have seen him.
But I remember I had to recite this poem at school assembly before we did the ‘march pass’, enroute to our classrooms: “Nkrumah never dies. Nkrumah is our leader. Nkrumah never dies. Nkrumah is our Messiah.” I recited it without attaching any particular meaning to the words. Now in my adult life, I think I recited those words because Nkrumah was and is truly a ‘Show Boy’, both in life and death – yes, even in death!
Otherwise, why are we organizing the man’s 100th birthday bash 37 years after his death? After all, mourning the dead is our biggest national past-time. Celebrating a birthday is to celebrate life.
Only a ‘Show Boy’ will have his own ideology with an institution named after himself (the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute), dedicated to the study of – you guess right – Nkrumahism, an ‘ism’ like racism and sexism. The ‘Show Boy’ had many things named after him – an airport and a university, among many others.
Given the benefit of a longer stay in power, who knows – he might have named Ghana after himself! Thinking of it now, it would have made sense. Travel the world and see – till today, even in death, when you mention Ghana, this country is immediately associated with Nkrumah. The gateway into Ghana, the airport, should as well be renamed after Nkrumah because his name is synonymous with Ghana. Kotoka who?
The ‘Show Boy’ was audacious, defiant, proud, ambitious, charismatic, visionary,
eloquent and restless. With defiant restless ambition, he demanded ‘self government now’ from the British. He ignited pride and lifted up the self-esteem of the black race. He was a great public speaker, punctuating his speeches with passionate antics and high drama. He wore the Kente cloth with pride, introducing it to the world when he wore it at the United Nations.
Even in his choice of a wife, the man was a ‘Show Boy.’ For strategic reasons, he found his bride in Egypt, a ploy in his quest for African unity. No wonder Africa will participate in the Nkrumah birthday bash!
Only a ‘Show Boy’ will have his personal linguist – Okyeame Okuffo, to recite praise poems to the Osagyefo before he opened his mouth (and he was not a chief!).
Clearly, the Show Boy loved to be President and be at the centre of things. He had his effigy made and erected at different locations. He crowned himself president for life and Ghana as a one party state – and that meant the Convention Peoples Party (CPP).
Many praise songs were composed and sang repeatedly to prop up his image as a messiah, the star of Ghana and a godlike figure who could make impossible things happen. There were patriotic songs too which helped to glue together the collection of disparate tribes into a nation state and to inspire national pride and push a development agenda.
He made baldness look handsome. Women loved him and loved Fathia too although she deprived a Ghanaian woman from becoming Ghana’s first First Lady.
Buy the Show Boy’s restlessness led him to introduce several austere measures, the most notorious being the Preventive Detention Act by which individuals who appeared to be against him were imprisoned indefinitely without trial. Under Nkrumah’s rule, the fog of fear thickened and hung heavily over Ghana. Press freedom was non-existent; the media was stuck under Nkrumah’s mighty thumb.
Even as a little school girl, I felt the fear. My outspoken grandfather, Nana Ansah Israel, repeatedly warned his grandchildren to be careful what information we shared at school about his utterances. He knew that he could easily be packaged and sent off to prison on account of innocent but careless disclosures about his criticisms of Osagyefo.
As Ghana toasts and roasts Nkrumah for turning 100 (in death), we should remember the anguish of the many who suffered under his rule. Deep grudges have been nurtured for decades and as his name is resurrected, the Nkrumah story must be told with great sensitivity because there are people who bear Nkrumah’s deeply inflicted scars. Every coin is double sided!
Nkrumah is now of the status of a dead man walking, living and thriving. It is as if Ghana still needs him to revive its development. But if the Show Boy should reappear today, he would not fit in; we might lynch him! And he would lock us up, again!
Even a coup d’etat could not destroy him; at least, not permanently. After the 1966 coup, his name became an abomination. Everything about him was considered evil. His statutes, like those of Sadam Hussein, were mocked, vandalized and decapitated. Lesson: when you have power, don’t greedily self aggrandize by naming things after yourself. But then, people don’t learn lessons. Three years ago, the then Rector of GIMPA, Dr Stephen Adei, named a building on the campus after his village. Hours after his retirement, the inscription was painted over! Ouch!
Nkrumah’s overthrow was followed by several years of political autopsy to analyse what went wrong. If only we would do more political biopsies during the life of a government to identify all the ailing organs of government and find healing before we’re injured beyond healing.
One of the reasons we can’t seem to get over Nkrumah is that Ghana’s development stalled after his departure. The ‘Show Boy’ gave us the Tema Motorway and Akosombo Dam, among many other national monuments; but he owned no personal property. We have not replicated anything close to these national landmarks since we booted Nkrumah out of office 43 years ago while he was busy running his big black mouth in Hanoi over the Vietnam War.
Still, after 52 years of Independence, several Ghanaians live a bare-bone existence in stinky abject poverty, struggling to afford one meal a day. Economic independence seems to have dodged us. That is why Nkrumah is sorely missed; by some!
As they say in Hollywood, “There’s no business like Show Business!” President Kwame Nkrumah was a ‘Show Boy’ from cradle to grave, from Mama Nyaniba’s back in a village in the middle of nowhere, to iconic stature as the most celebrated African of the last century and clearly, beyond.
I saw the man once. Well, not really! I was a little girl, barely above the ground in height with a Young Pioneer scarf tied around my innocent littleneck, crowded by taller older children by a village roadside. We had been lined up to wave miniature Ghana flags at the Osagyefo as his convoy zoomed past. I think I saw him. Not a chance! The ‘Show Boy’ was larger than life and I, a little inconsequential village girl, could not have seen him.
But I remember I had to recite this poem at school assembly before we did the ‘march pass’, enroute to our classrooms: “Nkrumah never dies. Nkrumah is our leader. Nkrumah never dies. Nkrumah is our Messiah.” I recited it without attaching any particular meaning to the words. Now in my adult life, I think I recited those words because Nkrumah was and is truly a ‘Show Boy’, both in life and death – yes, even in death!
Otherwise, why are we organizing the man’s 100th birthday bash 37 years after his death? After all, mourning the dead is our biggest national past-time. Celebrating a birthday is to celebrate life.
Only a ‘Show Boy’ will have his own ideology with an institution named after himself (the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute), dedicated to the study of – you guess right – Nkrumahism, an ‘ism’ like racism and sexism. The ‘Show Boy’ had many things named after him – an airport and a university, among many others.
Given the benefit of a longer stay in power, who knows – he might have named Ghana after himself! Thinking of it now, it would have made sense. Travel the world and see – till today, even in death, when you mention Ghana, this country is immediately associated with Nkrumah. The gateway into Ghana, the airport, should as well be renamed after Nkrumah because his name is synonymous with Ghana. Kotoka who?
The ‘Show Boy’ was audacious, defiant, proud, ambitious, charismatic, visionary,
eloquent and restless. With defiant restless ambition, he demanded ‘self government now’ from the British. He ignited pride and lifted up the self-esteem of the black race. He was a great public speaker, punctuating his speeches with passionate antics and high drama. He wore the Kente cloth with pride, introducing it to the world when he wore it at the United Nations.
Even in his choice of a wife, the man was a ‘Show Boy.’ For strategic reasons, he found his bride in Egypt, a ploy in his quest for African unity. No wonder Africa will participate in the Nkrumah birthday bash!
Only a ‘Show Boy’ will have his personal linguist – Okyeame Okuffo, to recite praise poems to the Osagyefo before he opened his mouth (and he was not a chief!).
Clearly, the Show Boy loved to be President and be at the centre of things. He had his effigy made and erected at different locations. He crowned himself president for life and Ghana as a one party state – and that meant the Convention Peoples Party (CPP).
Many praise songs were composed and sang repeatedly to prop up his image as a messiah, the star of Ghana and a godlike figure who could make impossible things happen. There were patriotic songs too which helped to glue together the collection of disparate tribes into a nation state and to inspire national pride and push a development agenda.
He made baldness look handsome. Women loved him and loved Fathia too although she deprived a Ghanaian woman from becoming Ghana’s first First Lady.
Buy the Show Boy’s restlessness led him to introduce several austere measures, the most notorious being the Preventive Detention Act by which individuals who appeared to be against him were imprisoned indefinitely without trial. Under Nkrumah’s rule, the fog of fear thickened and hung heavily over Ghana. Press freedom was non-existent; the media was stuck under Nkrumah’s mighty thumb.
Even as a little school girl, I felt the fear. My outspoken grandfather, Nana Ansah Israel, repeatedly warned his grandchildren to be careful what information we shared at school about his utterances. He knew that he could easily be packaged and sent off to prison on account of innocent but careless disclosures about his criticisms of Osagyefo.
As Ghana toasts and roasts Nkrumah for turning 100 (in death), we should remember the anguish of the many who suffered under his rule. Deep grudges have been nurtured for decades and as his name is resurrected, the Nkrumah story must be told with great sensitivity because there are people who bear Nkrumah’s deeply inflicted scars. Every coin is double sided!
Nkrumah is now of the status of a dead man walking, living and thriving. It is as if Ghana still needs him to revive its development. But if the Show Boy should reappear today, he would not fit in; we might lynch him! And he would lock us up, again!
Even a coup d’etat could not destroy him; at least, not permanently. After the 1966 coup, his name became an abomination. Everything about him was considered evil. His statutes, like those of Sadam Hussein, were mocked, vandalized and decapitated. Lesson: when you have power, don’t greedily self aggrandize by naming things after yourself. But then, people don’t learn lessons. Three years ago, the then Rector of GIMPA, Dr Stephen Adei, named a building on the campus after his village. Hours after his retirement, the inscription was painted over! Ouch!
Nkrumah’s overthrow was followed by several years of political autopsy to analyse what went wrong. If only we would do more political biopsies during the life of a government to identify all the ailing organs of government and find healing before we’re injured beyond healing.
One of the reasons we can’t seem to get over Nkrumah is that Ghana’s development stalled after his departure. The ‘Show Boy’ gave us the Tema Motorway and Akosombo Dam, among many other national monuments; but he owned no personal property. We have not replicated anything close to these national landmarks since we booted Nkrumah out of office 43 years ago while he was busy running his big black mouth in Hanoi over the Vietnam War.
Still, after 52 years of Independence, several Ghanaians live a bare-bone existence in stinky abject poverty, struggling to afford one meal a day. Economic independence seems to have dodged us. That is why Nkrumah is sorely missed; by some!
Counting plastic bags in a shop
Last Saturday, I gave my neighbour, Auntie Felicia (not her real name), a plastic bag counting assignment. She owns a shop, in-built into her front wall. She sells provisions (milk, Milo, sugar, soaps, margarine, PK, yoghurt, bread, etc.) and several other items in her shop. Hers is like any typical shop scattered throughout Ghana.
There are six of such shops on my street alone – the tarred portion; the supposedly privileged part where I live my supposedly privileged life. There are more of such shops beyond, where tar has never touched; might never touch in this generation.
In my estimate, there are about 100 of such shops in my general neighbourhood. I wonder if anyone is responsible for counting shops in the country, let alone, to imagine the quantities of single-use plastics that are given away in shops and markets throughout Ghana.
Join me on a brief trip through major markets in Ghana. While on the trip, imagine the quantities of single-use plastics in which traders package assorted items to their customers. Some of the major markets are: Makola, Madina, Malam Attah, Nima, Agbogbloshie, Kasoa, Kintampo, Tamale Central, Bawku, Walewale, Salaga/Sraha, Bodjoase, Asafo and Techiman markets, among several others.
Now, let’s return to Accra, to my neighbour’s shop. Here are the results of Auntie Felicia’s assignment last Saturday. From about 6:30 in the morning when she opened the shop for business until she closed about 9:30 pm, she gave out the following single-use non-biodegradable plastic bags as packaging for customers.
The smaller size black plastic bags are known as “Take Away”. She gave out 88 pieces of those. She also gave out 102 medium size black plastic bags and an additional twelve pieces of the large size black plastic bags.
Some single-use thin transparent plastics, called “Margarine Rubber”, also made the rounds from her hands. That’s the type used to package items like bread, scooped margarine (that’s probably how it got its name!) and anything sold in smaller quantities, so small that the manufacturer did not foresee or was not interested to package. Auntie Felicia gave out 21 of those margarine rubber bags last Saturday.
Another avenue for dishing out single-use plastics into the environment is the naughty ‘Pure’ water in sachets (packets). Auntie Felicia sold 77 sachets of “Pure” water last Saturday. How pure the water is, no one can tell. Yet, it is a free-for-all big business.
Petty trading overwhelms our national landscape. From ‘table-tops’ to full-blown shops built into walls of most houses which are located near roadsides; from properly designated markets with numerous market stalls to young and old hawkers who parade street shoulders. Wherever you turn, someone is selling something. Not that there is anything wrong with trading. My mother is a trader too! It is the indiscriminate and mindless use of plastics to package just about everything sold that must trouble us.
Who is counting the sheer volume of non-biodegradable single-use plastics that is produced, imported and mindlessly used in this country everyday, every week, every month and every year? Who is doing the maths to put a finger on the quantities? We must know the quantity, so we would see the urgency in putting a stop to it.
Let’s do a little multiplication of the quantity of plastics Auntie Felicia gave out last Saturday by a few thousands to figure out the quantities on the national level for one day. Conservatively speaking, let’s multiply Auntie Felicia’s single-use plastics give-aways of one day by only three thousand. This would include different plastic give-away locations like markets, shops, hawkers, petty traders and stationary roadside sellers.
That would give us a rough guesstimate (guess plus estimate) of quantity of single-use plastics in Ghana in just one day as follows: medium size plastics – 306,000 pieces, small size ‘Take-away’ plastics – 264,000, thin transparent ‘margarine’ rubber – 63,000 pieces, large-size black plastic bags – 36,000 pieces and ‘Pure Water’ sachet plastics – 231,000 pieces.
A guesstimated total single-use plastics we dump into the environment in one day is a whopping 900,000 pieces, close to one million! Note again that these figures only represent one day of single-use plastics.
As you read this, give a thought to your personal plastic bag life. Yes, we all lead plastic bag lives. Koko, kokonte, fufuu, groundnuts, roasted plantains, soup, and banku -- all come packaged to us in multiple plastic bags. Adults, the youth, children, men, women, rich and poor and everyone up and down the social ladder lead a plastic life.
A story. I entered the office of a senior government official about 8:30 in the morning. He was sucking Hausa Koko from a thin transparent plastic. Yes, a grown man was sucking koko like a child sucking the mother’s breast. Oddly, he found nothing wrong with it. The nastiest thing I saw recently was a group of school-going children in uniform sucking banku and soup from plastics.
These are bizarre examples of our mindless use of plastics. After the sucking, we just toss the plastic into the environment, never thinking of what happens to plastics when they leave our hands after a single use.
Too many things are packaged in single-use plastics. Very often, things are packaged in multiple plastics, one inside the other and inside yet another. And when we throw garbage away, we do so with the multiple plastics confusingly interwoven in our garbage. Plastics therefore are literally inseparable from other garbage because plastics have become the foundation – yea, the character of our garbage.
In the past week, a sanitation company that is trying to enter the Ghanaian market staged a demonstration of their products. The company is named Bola Solutions. What an interesting name! Yes, Ghana needs desperate solutions to its bola problems. Before Independence in 1957, our solid waste was incinerated so it was nicknamed ‘bola’ after the hard-to-pronounce word, broiler. Those days, garbage was simple and could easily be burnt and reduced to ashes.
But now, our bola is very complicated, made more complex with scientific and technological inventions like plastics, computers and cans which are tough and do not readily lend themselves to incineration and to easy solutions.
Bola Solutions treated a container-full of garbage with the application of enzymes and after one week, we re-visited to observe its new status. In one week, much of the bola of old (left over food, etc.) had quenched. But a heap of bola was left untouched. It comprised of the items which are at the heart of our waste management quagmire: plastics, lorry tyres, electronic parts and cans.
Poor people’s bola is too complicated. As a student in a previous life elsewhere, I benefited from picking good stuff (TV, desk, chair) from privileged people’s bola. But poor people’s bola is true bola, difficult to find much that is usable. It’s rendered in worst condition because we don’t segregate; everything is jumbled together to form one big ugly filthy mess of garbage.
I shudder to imagine what Ghana would become five to ten years from now if we do not ban non-biodegradable plastics. Every day, every week, every month, every year, we pile up unknown quantities of plastics which are not decomposing. We are irresponsibly committing a collective national act of insanity.
Counting plastic bags in a shop
Last Saturday, I gave my neighbour, Auntie Felicia (not her real name), a plastic bag counting assignment. She owns a shop, in-built into her front wall. She sells provisions (milk, Milo, sugar, soaps, margarine, PK, yoghurt, bread, etc.) and several other items in her shop. Hers is like any typical shop scattered throughout Ghana.
There are six of such shops on my street alone – the tarred portion; the supposedly privileged part where I live my supposedly privileged life. There are more of such shops beyond, where tar has never touched; might never touch in this generation.
In my estimate, there are about 100 of such shops in my general neighbourhood. I wonder if anyone is responsible for counting shops in the country, let alone, to imagine the quantities of single-use plastics that are given away in shops and markets throughout Ghana.
Join me on a brief trip through major markets in Ghana. While on the trip, imagine the quantities of single-use plastics in which traders package assorted items to their customers. Some of the major markets are: Makola, Madina, Malam Attah, Nima, Agbogbloshie, Kasoa, Kintampo, Tamale Central, Bawku, Walewale, Salaga/Sraha, Bodjoase, Asafo and Techiman markets, among several others.
Now, let’s return to Accra, to my neighbour’s shop. Here are the results of Auntie Felicia’s assignment last Saturday. From about 6:30 in the morning when she opened the shop for business until she closed about 9:30 pm, she gave out the following single-use non-biodegradable plastic bags as packaging for customers.
The smaller size black plastic bags are known as “Take Away”. She gave out 88 pieces of those. She also gave out 102 medium size black plastic bags and an additional twelve pieces of the large size black plastic bags.
Some single-use thin transparent plastics, called “Margarine Rubber”, also made the rounds from her hands. That’s the type used to package items like bread, scooped margarine (that’s probably how it got its name!) and anything sold in smaller quantities, so small that the manufacturer did not foresee or was not interested to package. Auntie Felicia gave out 21 of those margarine rubber bags last Saturday.
Another avenue for dishing out single-use plastics into the environment is the naughty ‘Pure’ water in sachets (packets). Auntie Felicia sold 77 sachets of “Pure” water last Saturday. How pure the water is, no one can tell. Yet, it is a free-for-all big business.
Petty trading overwhelms our national landscape. From ‘table-tops’ to full-blown shops built into walls of most houses which are located near roadsides; from properly designated markets with numerous market stalls to young and old hawkers who parade street shoulders. Wherever you turn, someone is selling something. Not that there is anything wrong with trading. My mother is a trader too! It is the indiscriminate and mindless use of plastics to package just about everything sold that must trouble us.
Who is counting the sheer volume of non-biodegradable single-use plastics that is produced, imported and mindlessly used in this country everyday, every week, every month and every year? Who is doing the maths to put a finger on the quantities? We must know the quantity, so we would see the urgency in putting a stop to it.
Let’s do a little multiplication of the quantity of plastics Auntie Felicia gave out last Saturday by a few thousands to figure out the quantities on the national level for one day. Conservatively speaking, let’s multiply Auntie Felicia’s single-use plastics give-aways of one day by only three thousand. This would include different plastic give-away locations like markets, shops, hawkers, petty traders and stationary roadside sellers.
That would give us a rough guesstimate (guess plus estimate) of quantity of single-use plastics in Ghana in just one day as follows: medium size plastics – 306,000 pieces, small size ‘Take-away’ plastics – 264,000, thin transparent ‘margarine’ rubber – 63,000 pieces, large-size black plastic bags – 36,000 pieces and ‘Pure Water’ sachet plastics – 231,000 pieces.
A guesstimated total single-use plastics we dump into the environment in one day is a whopping 900,000 pieces, close to one million! Note again that these figures only represent one day of single-use plastics.
As you read this, give a thought to your personal plastic bag life. Yes, we all lead plastic bag lives. Koko, kokonte, fufuu, groundnuts, roasted plantains, soup, and banku -- all come packaged to us in multiple plastic bags. Adults, the youth, children, men, women, rich and poor and everyone up and down the social ladder lead a plastic life.
A story. I entered the office of a senior government official about 8:30 in the morning. He was sucking Hausa Koko from a thin transparent plastic. Yes, a grown man was sucking koko like a child sucking the mother’s breast. Oddly, he found nothing wrong with it. The nastiest thing I saw recently was a group of school-going children in uniform sucking banku and soup from plastics.
These are bizarre examples of our mindless use of plastics. After the sucking, we just toss the plastic into the environment, never thinking of what happens to plastics when they leave our hands after a single use.
Too many things are packaged in single-use plastics. Very often, things are packaged in multiple plastics, one inside the other and inside yet another. And when we throw garbage away, we do so with the multiple plastics confusingly interwoven in our garbage. Plastics therefore are literally inseparable from other garbage because plastics have become the foundation – yea, the character of our garbage.
In the past week, a sanitation company that is trying to enter the Ghanaian market staged a demonstration of their products. The company is named Bola Solutions. What an interesting name! Yes, Ghana needs desperate solutions to its bola problems. Before Independence in 1957, our solid waste was incinerated so it was nicknamed ‘bola’ after the hard-to-pronounce word, broiler. Those days, garbage was simple and could easily be burnt and reduced to ashes.
But now, our bola is very complicated, made more complex with scientific and technological inventions like plastics, computers and cans which are tough and do not readily lend themselves to incineration and to easy solutions.
Bola Solutions treated a container-full of garbage with the application of enzymes and after one week, we re-visited to observe its new status. In one week, much of the bola of old (left over food, etc.) had quenched. But a heap of bola was left untouched. It comprised of the items which are at the heart of our waste management quagmire: plastics, lorry tyres, electronic parts and cans.
Poor people’s bola is too complicated. As a student in a previous life elsewhere, I benefited from picking good stuff (TV, desk, chair) from privileged people’s bola. But poor people’s bola is true bola, difficult to find much that is usable. It’s rendered in worst condition because we don’t segregate; everything is jumbled together to form one big ugly filthy mess of garbage.
I shudder to imagine what Ghana would become five to ten years from now if we do not ban non-biodegradable plastics. Every day, every week, every month, every year, we pile up unknown quantities of plastics which are not decomposing. We are irresponsibly committing a collective national act of insanity.
There are six of such shops on my street alone – the tarred portion; the supposedly privileged part where I live my supposedly privileged life. There are more of such shops beyond, where tar has never touched; might never touch in this generation.
In my estimate, there are about 100 of such shops in my general neighbourhood. I wonder if anyone is responsible for counting shops in the country, let alone, to imagine the quantities of single-use plastics that are given away in shops and markets throughout Ghana.
Join me on a brief trip through major markets in Ghana. While on the trip, imagine the quantities of single-use plastics in which traders package assorted items to their customers. Some of the major markets are: Makola, Madina, Malam Attah, Nima, Agbogbloshie, Kasoa, Kintampo, Tamale Central, Bawku, Walewale, Salaga/Sraha, Bodjoase, Asafo and Techiman markets, among several others.
Now, let’s return to Accra, to my neighbour’s shop. Here are the results of Auntie Felicia’s assignment last Saturday. From about 6:30 in the morning when she opened the shop for business until she closed about 9:30 pm, she gave out the following single-use non-biodegradable plastic bags as packaging for customers.
The smaller size black plastic bags are known as “Take Away”. She gave out 88 pieces of those. She also gave out 102 medium size black plastic bags and an additional twelve pieces of the large size black plastic bags.
Some single-use thin transparent plastics, called “Margarine Rubber”, also made the rounds from her hands. That’s the type used to package items like bread, scooped margarine (that’s probably how it got its name!) and anything sold in smaller quantities, so small that the manufacturer did not foresee or was not interested to package. Auntie Felicia gave out 21 of those margarine rubber bags last Saturday.
Another avenue for dishing out single-use plastics into the environment is the naughty ‘Pure’ water in sachets (packets). Auntie Felicia sold 77 sachets of “Pure” water last Saturday. How pure the water is, no one can tell. Yet, it is a free-for-all big business.
Petty trading overwhelms our national landscape. From ‘table-tops’ to full-blown shops built into walls of most houses which are located near roadsides; from properly designated markets with numerous market stalls to young and old hawkers who parade street shoulders. Wherever you turn, someone is selling something. Not that there is anything wrong with trading. My mother is a trader too! It is the indiscriminate and mindless use of plastics to package just about everything sold that must trouble us.
Who is counting the sheer volume of non-biodegradable single-use plastics that is produced, imported and mindlessly used in this country everyday, every week, every month and every year? Who is doing the maths to put a finger on the quantities? We must know the quantity, so we would see the urgency in putting a stop to it.
Let’s do a little multiplication of the quantity of plastics Auntie Felicia gave out last Saturday by a few thousands to figure out the quantities on the national level for one day. Conservatively speaking, let’s multiply Auntie Felicia’s single-use plastics give-aways of one day by only three thousand. This would include different plastic give-away locations like markets, shops, hawkers, petty traders and stationary roadside sellers.
That would give us a rough guesstimate (guess plus estimate) of quantity of single-use plastics in Ghana in just one day as follows: medium size plastics – 306,000 pieces, small size ‘Take-away’ plastics – 264,000, thin transparent ‘margarine’ rubber – 63,000 pieces, large-size black plastic bags – 36,000 pieces and ‘Pure Water’ sachet plastics – 231,000 pieces.
A guesstimated total single-use plastics we dump into the environment in one day is a whopping 900,000 pieces, close to one million! Note again that these figures only represent one day of single-use plastics.
As you read this, give a thought to your personal plastic bag life. Yes, we all lead plastic bag lives. Koko, kokonte, fufuu, groundnuts, roasted plantains, soup, and banku -- all come packaged to us in multiple plastic bags. Adults, the youth, children, men, women, rich and poor and everyone up and down the social ladder lead a plastic life.
A story. I entered the office of a senior government official about 8:30 in the morning. He was sucking Hausa Koko from a thin transparent plastic. Yes, a grown man was sucking koko like a child sucking the mother’s breast. Oddly, he found nothing wrong with it. The nastiest thing I saw recently was a group of school-going children in uniform sucking banku and soup from plastics.
These are bizarre examples of our mindless use of plastics. After the sucking, we just toss the plastic into the environment, never thinking of what happens to plastics when they leave our hands after a single use.
Too many things are packaged in single-use plastics. Very often, things are packaged in multiple plastics, one inside the other and inside yet another. And when we throw garbage away, we do so with the multiple plastics confusingly interwoven in our garbage. Plastics therefore are literally inseparable from other garbage because plastics have become the foundation – yea, the character of our garbage.
In the past week, a sanitation company that is trying to enter the Ghanaian market staged a demonstration of their products. The company is named Bola Solutions. What an interesting name! Yes, Ghana needs desperate solutions to its bola problems. Before Independence in 1957, our solid waste was incinerated so it was nicknamed ‘bola’ after the hard-to-pronounce word, broiler. Those days, garbage was simple and could easily be burnt and reduced to ashes.
But now, our bola is very complicated, made more complex with scientific and technological inventions like plastics, computers and cans which are tough and do not readily lend themselves to incineration and to easy solutions.
Bola Solutions treated a container-full of garbage with the application of enzymes and after one week, we re-visited to observe its new status. In one week, much of the bola of old (left over food, etc.) had quenched. But a heap of bola was left untouched. It comprised of the items which are at the heart of our waste management quagmire: plastics, lorry tyres, electronic parts and cans.
Poor people’s bola is too complicated. As a student in a previous life elsewhere, I benefited from picking good stuff (TV, desk, chair) from privileged people’s bola. But poor people’s bola is true bola, difficult to find much that is usable. It’s rendered in worst condition because we don’t segregate; everything is jumbled together to form one big ugly filthy mess of garbage.
I shudder to imagine what Ghana would become five to ten years from now if we do not ban non-biodegradable plastics. Every day, every week, every month, every year, we pile up unknown quantities of plastics which are not decomposing. We are irresponsibly committing a collective national act of insanity.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Malfeasance gives giant goose pimples
There is a time to sing, a time to dance and lo, a time to ponder over the deep meaning of words. The word malfeasance has made a grand entry into recent media discourse so join me to muse over, yea – chew the word as we dig deep into its meaning. Be ready for giant goose pimples and a skin crawl. On the surface, malfeasance sounds like an innocent beautiful word; it even sounds musical and has both a buzz and a hum to it. But …….
Malfeasance is a two-part word – both bad. ‘Mal’ simply means bad; like in maladministration (administration that has gone bad) while ‘feasance’ has an eerie similarity with a word in the liquid waste family. In effect, malfeasance is like a pile of cow dung, like manure that has been rained on! Nasty! Malfeasance is so bad that it takes away the incense from what should have otherwise been a good situation.
I checked the Oxford Dictionary for words in the general neighbourhood of malfeasance by alphabetical listing. Here are some of the neighbouring words: Malcontent (a disconnected person; a rebel). Malediction (a curse). Malefactor (a criminal; a person who does evil). Malevolent (wishing evil to others). Malfeasance (doing evil to others). Malformation (faulty formation).
Malfunction (a failure to function in a normal or satisfactory manner). Malice (the intention to do evil; a desire to tease, especially cruelly). Malign (injurious; speak ill of; slander. From Latin – ‘malignus’). Malignant (harmful; feeling or showing intense ill will; of a disease – infectious; of a tumour tending to invade normal tissue and return after removal; cancerous).
So malfeasance is in bad company indeed. It is overwhelmed by bad siblings, bad cousins, bad uncles, bad aunties, bad children, and definitely bad parents and grandparents – and sumptuously feeds off on sycophancy, greed and impudence.
From media reports, it appears that we have developed a certain insatiable appetite for malfeasance. Listening and reading media content give the impression that Ghana is having a grand malfeasance party. The party is attended by politicians, public and civil servants, the police and customs officers; and boldly gate-crashed by my brethrens in the mass media.
Bribery, gifts and corruption are the alcohol of choice offered at the malfeasance party. These are drank nyafu-nyafu, with reckless abandon, turning public service into self service. Someday, the privileged elite would wake up to realize that the rank and file of this country completely mistrust them.
Malfeasance is in high, low and middle places, with people outdoing one another. These people belong to the aristocracy class. They are hunters and gatherers, not farmers. They sniff for spoil; they plunder and loot where they have not sewn. And they do so with a sense of entitlement and impudence and with an annoying swagger as if Ghana belongs to them.
The stench of malfeasance is smelt when things begin to unravel, a thread at a time. But whenever, like in recent M&J, Muntaka, Sekyi-Hughes and Ghana@50 news cycles, several threads unravel suddenly, the nostrils of an entire nation become blocked. Malfeasance is more noticeable when power is lost. During power-packed periods, signs of malfeasance appear to be normal, with an assumed birth-right to chop-chop while the population worships the perpetrators.
People from fabulously deprived backgrounds, who suddenly find themselves in malfeasance opportunities, lose their minds. But when the opportunity seat is pulled off, their excesses are acknowledged as filthy, followed by groundswell disgrace.
Malfeasance is both seductive and addictive. Like alcoholism, it typically begins small – a little taste of the stuff, followed by enjoyment, until the person is caught firmly and deeply in the grips of malfeasance. Politicians, public officials, civil servants, police and customs officers and media practitioners literally carry the sign, “We’re open for business. Bring it on!”
Those who engage in acts of malfeasance, could they be described as “Malfeasance Practitioners” just as professionals like lawyers and doctors are known as legal and medical practitioners? This naming could remove malfeasance from the shady gooey realm into where it belongs – in the open, to be confronted squarely by its arch triple enemies – Transparency, Probity and Accountability (TPA).
As a people, we appear to have become stuck on relationships that are predicated firmly on cedi and gravy. Relatives, friends, relatives of friends, and friends of relatives pile up pressure, demanding favours, which tend to add ugliness to malfeasance.
From our meagre public purse, our leaders have access to our money (which they take and take). Then for decorative good effect, we also give them (or they take) gravy. Gravy comprises of privileges and opportunities with which our elected and appointed leaders clothe themselves and their cronies. We, the citizenry, spoil them and even address some of them by undeserved titles like Honourable.
Invariably, this results in the privatization of what belongs to all by/for a few privileged folks. Clearly, public officials from the time of independence to the 4th Republican era of NPP and NDC1&2 all suffer from the malfeasance disease, which have led (lead?) them to plunder both tangible and intangible things which belong to all the people. Crude oil will breed sophisticated multicoloured illegitimate children of malfeasance.
As you continue to ponder over malfeasance, keep the following images in mind as a backdrop. Five percent of Ghanaians go to bed hungry – on empty stomachs. These are our town folks who live on air diet, water diet, and indeed, no diet at all. These are our village and city folks who are male/female, young/old, children/adults, tall/short, girls/boys who float in poverty and swim in hunger.
These are the children who go to school under trees and pretend to study under the guidance of teachers who are hardly literate or who have over time, lost their literacy because after all, literacy belongs to the ‘use it or lose it’ family of skills. These are the real victims of malfeasance – the quintessential road-kills.
A legitimate question that arises from pondering over these victims of malfeasance is: Do our leaders – politicians, civil/public servants and all the many practitioners of malfeasance who have easy and unlimited access to the public purse and opportunities hate Ghana? Do they love themselves so much that the self-love translates into hatred for this country?
Here is an Aesop fable. Much like Kweku Ananse stories, Aesop fables use animals as the main characters in the stories. Aesop was an ex-slave who was freed from slavery because of his wit in telling simple and intelligent stories to drive home important points. Here is one of such tales, titled, “The Lion, the Mouse and the Fox.”
A lion, fatigued by the heat of the sunshine, fell asleep in his den. A mouse ran over his mane and ears and woke him from his slumber. He rose up and shook himself in great wrath and searched every corner of his den to find the mouse. A fox saw him and asked, “Oh, so a fine lion like you is frightened of a mouse?” The lion responded, “It’s not the mouse I fear. I resent his familiarity and ill breeding.”
Is malfeasance a child of ill breeding?
Malfeasance is a two-part word – both bad. ‘Mal’ simply means bad; like in maladministration (administration that has gone bad) while ‘feasance’ has an eerie similarity with a word in the liquid waste family. In effect, malfeasance is like a pile of cow dung, like manure that has been rained on! Nasty! Malfeasance is so bad that it takes away the incense from what should have otherwise been a good situation.
I checked the Oxford Dictionary for words in the general neighbourhood of malfeasance by alphabetical listing. Here are some of the neighbouring words: Malcontent (a disconnected person; a rebel). Malediction (a curse). Malefactor (a criminal; a person who does evil). Malevolent (wishing evil to others). Malfeasance (doing evil to others). Malformation (faulty formation).
Malfunction (a failure to function in a normal or satisfactory manner). Malice (the intention to do evil; a desire to tease, especially cruelly). Malign (injurious; speak ill of; slander. From Latin – ‘malignus’). Malignant (harmful; feeling or showing intense ill will; of a disease – infectious; of a tumour tending to invade normal tissue and return after removal; cancerous).
So malfeasance is in bad company indeed. It is overwhelmed by bad siblings, bad cousins, bad uncles, bad aunties, bad children, and definitely bad parents and grandparents – and sumptuously feeds off on sycophancy, greed and impudence.
From media reports, it appears that we have developed a certain insatiable appetite for malfeasance. Listening and reading media content give the impression that Ghana is having a grand malfeasance party. The party is attended by politicians, public and civil servants, the police and customs officers; and boldly gate-crashed by my brethrens in the mass media.
Bribery, gifts and corruption are the alcohol of choice offered at the malfeasance party. These are drank nyafu-nyafu, with reckless abandon, turning public service into self service. Someday, the privileged elite would wake up to realize that the rank and file of this country completely mistrust them.
Malfeasance is in high, low and middle places, with people outdoing one another. These people belong to the aristocracy class. They are hunters and gatherers, not farmers. They sniff for spoil; they plunder and loot where they have not sewn. And they do so with a sense of entitlement and impudence and with an annoying swagger as if Ghana belongs to them.
The stench of malfeasance is smelt when things begin to unravel, a thread at a time. But whenever, like in recent M&J, Muntaka, Sekyi-Hughes and Ghana@50 news cycles, several threads unravel suddenly, the nostrils of an entire nation become blocked. Malfeasance is more noticeable when power is lost. During power-packed periods, signs of malfeasance appear to be normal, with an assumed birth-right to chop-chop while the population worships the perpetrators.
People from fabulously deprived backgrounds, who suddenly find themselves in malfeasance opportunities, lose their minds. But when the opportunity seat is pulled off, their excesses are acknowledged as filthy, followed by groundswell disgrace.
Malfeasance is both seductive and addictive. Like alcoholism, it typically begins small – a little taste of the stuff, followed by enjoyment, until the person is caught firmly and deeply in the grips of malfeasance. Politicians, public officials, civil servants, police and customs officers and media practitioners literally carry the sign, “We’re open for business. Bring it on!”
Those who engage in acts of malfeasance, could they be described as “Malfeasance Practitioners” just as professionals like lawyers and doctors are known as legal and medical practitioners? This naming could remove malfeasance from the shady gooey realm into where it belongs – in the open, to be confronted squarely by its arch triple enemies – Transparency, Probity and Accountability (TPA).
As a people, we appear to have become stuck on relationships that are predicated firmly on cedi and gravy. Relatives, friends, relatives of friends, and friends of relatives pile up pressure, demanding favours, which tend to add ugliness to malfeasance.
From our meagre public purse, our leaders have access to our money (which they take and take). Then for decorative good effect, we also give them (or they take) gravy. Gravy comprises of privileges and opportunities with which our elected and appointed leaders clothe themselves and their cronies. We, the citizenry, spoil them and even address some of them by undeserved titles like Honourable.
Invariably, this results in the privatization of what belongs to all by/for a few privileged folks. Clearly, public officials from the time of independence to the 4th Republican era of NPP and NDC1&2 all suffer from the malfeasance disease, which have led (lead?) them to plunder both tangible and intangible things which belong to all the people. Crude oil will breed sophisticated multicoloured illegitimate children of malfeasance.
As you continue to ponder over malfeasance, keep the following images in mind as a backdrop. Five percent of Ghanaians go to bed hungry – on empty stomachs. These are our town folks who live on air diet, water diet, and indeed, no diet at all. These are our village and city folks who are male/female, young/old, children/adults, tall/short, girls/boys who float in poverty and swim in hunger.
These are the children who go to school under trees and pretend to study under the guidance of teachers who are hardly literate or who have over time, lost their literacy because after all, literacy belongs to the ‘use it or lose it’ family of skills. These are the real victims of malfeasance – the quintessential road-kills.
A legitimate question that arises from pondering over these victims of malfeasance is: Do our leaders – politicians, civil/public servants and all the many practitioners of malfeasance who have easy and unlimited access to the public purse and opportunities hate Ghana? Do they love themselves so much that the self-love translates into hatred for this country?
Here is an Aesop fable. Much like Kweku Ananse stories, Aesop fables use animals as the main characters in the stories. Aesop was an ex-slave who was freed from slavery because of his wit in telling simple and intelligent stories to drive home important points. Here is one of such tales, titled, “The Lion, the Mouse and the Fox.”
A lion, fatigued by the heat of the sunshine, fell asleep in his den. A mouse ran over his mane and ears and woke him from his slumber. He rose up and shook himself in great wrath and searched every corner of his den to find the mouse. A fox saw him and asked, “Oh, so a fine lion like you is frightened of a mouse?” The lion responded, “It’s not the mouse I fear. I resent his familiarity and ill breeding.”
Is malfeasance a child of ill breeding?
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