‘Definition of a miracle’: A book review

Farida Bedwei, author of 'Definition of a miracle.'

Last weekend, I met Farida Bedwei, an awesome woman. She is a miracle. Although young, she is an old soul, oozing wisdom. She ignited in me deep feelings of expansiveness, of the strength of the human spirit, and of the many possibilities. Without a doubt, Farida is the courageous pioneer of her destiny. Her life teaches that human ingenuity is such that regardless of your disabilities (which we all have in one form or the other), if you are resilient enough, you can transcend your challenges.

Farida is one of the top software engineers in Ghana!

Her novel, ‘Definition of a miracle’, presents a perceptive testimony of someone who knows about the subject matter she so expertly writes about: disability. You see, Farida was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when she was only ten days old; a baby who was not conscious of her existence on mother-earth. Her life journey was therefore solidly paved before she knew who she was. She got stuck with a disability that causes the average Ghanaian, suffering from the awful sinking sickening diseases of prejudice, ignorance and fatalism, to stare at her.

A must-read book:

Books are marvellous inventions of perceptive human intelligence; written pieces are. A good piece of writing can save you from yourself and provide a refuge that can sustain you. Good writing can connect the dots in the development of a society and show the path toward progress.

Farida’s novel is art imitating life; autobiographical. It’s a narrative about Zaara, an eight-year old girl with cerebral palsy who was born in England. Her parents are well-educated; her mother is a lawyer and the father is a crop scientist. The family’s relocation to Ghana lays bare the ridiculously profane depths to which even things that have scientifically-proven explanations are ascribed to spiritual causes. Before long, her mother jumps onto slippery pray-for-me gravy trains to find healing for her ‘sick’ daughter.

In this novel, the reader gets a front-row seat to the struggles of a person who lives with a physical disability in the rough terrain of our society. But the novel also chronicles the possibilities and the triumphs, as well as the positive outcomes if love and care is lavished on the disabled. Yes, disabled persons can lead productive lives, to their full potential.

The book challenges Ghana to wake up to some of the many knots in the strands of our national fabric. These knots include, among many others, the implementation of sound national policies that can provide a life of dignity for the disabled; a healing of our unproductive attitudes; and a halt to our unhealthy super-religiousness, pretentious Christianity, and fatalistic beliefs – especially witchcraft.

Soon after Zaara’s diagnosis in the UK, a friend of the baby’s grandmother claimed that whilst praying in Accra, it was revealed to her that one Auntie Dede, a widow with a pleasant demeanour, was responsible for the child’s sickness. Auntie Dede had used witchcraft to steal and cook Zaara’s legs to render her disabled. What a cock-and-bull revelation! A relative on the father’s side, who is a fetish priest, also came up with his own theory of the spiritual cause of baby Zaara’s sickness.

So regardless of medical science’s diagnosis of cerebral palsy that was caused by the Meningitis Zaara had as a baby, our ignoramus folks desperately sought solace in their own backward spiritual beliefs to explain the condition. But worse of all, an innocent woman was perceived to be guilty without any proof whatsoever.

One of the ridiculous and tense moments of the novel was when Zaara’s mother, a lawyer – who should know better and set a good example, hit the pray-for-me path in hot pursuit of healing for her daughter. In the process, she tied herself to a con-artist female pastor, entrusting her with inconsequential details of her life. Such contradictions make you wonder if our culture, the basis of our belief system, is not just a trap waiting to ensnare the many gullible – literate and non-literate alike.

‘Definition of a miracle’ is not a booklet like the many hollow books that are increasingly piling up on our book stands. It is a whopping 389 page well-plotted, well-written book. In this novel, you’ll come across creativity at its best. The dialoguing is superb, rendering it very much alive and real to the point that you forget you’re reading a work of fiction. Undoubtedly, Farida is a deep thinker and a master wordsmith.

So who is a ‘sickla’?

Cerebral palsy robbed Farida’s body of some of its ‘rightful physical functions.’ Despite that robbery, Farida has excelled. Yet, in our society, people who live with disabilities are regularly referred to as ‘sick persons,’ handicapped or ‘sicklas’. These are inappropriate adjectives, loaded with negative connotations.

A disabled person is not sick. Disability is just a limitation – physical or otherwise. Disability simply means an inability to do one thing or the other. Aren’t we all plagued by one disability or the other? What do you say about people who suffer from terminal laziness, swollen-headedness, over-blown egos and the many who are not law-abiding? Don’t all these amount to some sort of handicap and disability? Who has a God-given right to define what is normal? Normalcy by whose standards?

Fact: Ghana is not disabled-friendly. If you fall down tomorrow and break a leg (Knock on wood! Tofiakwa!), you would know how deeply true this statement is. Ghana is unprepared for you and your broken leg! Where there are pavements, many are cracked and pothole-ridden to render them unusable. Many public buildings cannot be entered by the physically disabled. How do you climb a stiff stair-case with a broken leg or no legs? So we might as well just put up screaming signs at many points to announce: ‘The Physically Disabled Are Not Welcome.’

At the launch of ‘Definition of a miracle’, it was suggested that the book should become a text book in the school system. I completely agree. As our country dreams of becoming a middle-income economy, (lavishly greased with crude oil), certain things must change.

Fact: Middle income societies give regard to the disabled; they’re not left to their fate to sit in second-hand wheelchairs, or crawl on all-fours or skate boards by busy road-sides as full-time beggars. Middle income people are not fatalists, as a rule. Middle income people do not hand over their lives to pastors and fetish priests. Middle income people take charge of their destinies, and work toward enhancing their progress and quality of life.

Another plus of the novel is the humour that will get you cracking up in your rib cage as you realise that laughter is truly the best medicine. Even the author’s honesty is at once shocking and refreshing. Farida boldly describes her physical condition as: “…..when I walk, I sway about like an alcoholic at the helm of his drunken stupor.’

‘Definition of a miracle’ is a ‘non-put-downable’ sort of novel. It challenges the reader to interrogate deeply-held prejudices that are steeped in our culture of ignorance and backwardness.

However, despite the beautiful writing, an unfortunate weakness of the book is that it suffers from poor proof-reading. There are sentences with missing words. Punctuation marks are not always placed properly. In some cases, where there should be ‘full-stops’ or commas, they are absent. Such weaknesses must be fixed before a re-print. Mediocrity must not be allowed in Ghana’s burgeoning book publishing industry.

A gaze into the eyes of the fruit seller’s daughter

I asked the fruit seller’s daughter: ‘How much is one pineapple? Oh, and four large-sized mangoes.’ Her mother was away and has left her assorted-fruit stand for the girl to manage. She hesitated in answering, and offered me a grand display of timidity. She brought me a watermelon. I repeated, ‘I want a pineapple and mangoes.’ She stammered and absent-mindedly, brought me two pineapples. I repeated my request for mangoes. She returned and brought me mangoes and bananas. I said, ‘I did not ask for bananas.’

With the drama that unravelled from my attempt to buy fruits, which we’re told are good for our health, I decided to probe into her life story. She’s Abena (not her real name, of course). She is 12 years old and is in class three in a neighbourhood ‘Cyto’ primary school. My attempt to speak some really rudimentary English with her fell completely flat. Basic questions like ‘What is your name?’ How old are you? What school do you attend?’ drew out timid grins and zero response back in English, which clearly seemed to be a very foreign language to her.

To the question, ‘How much is the pineapple, and oh, the mangoes?’, she could only respond in the old cedi currency, by telling me the cost in the thousands. Apparently, at age 12, she is unfamiliar with the new Ghana cedi and would be one of the many Ghanaians who will forever operate in the old currency, because to them, ‘The value is (and will always remain) the same,’ regardless of the large-scale effort of the Bank of Ghana by way of public education campaigns to switch over from the old to the new currency.

A peep into Abena’s soul:

My chit chat session with Abena left me wondering if I was witnessing a classic case of low IQ. But then I thought, if she was that stupid, her mother would not have left her entire fruit stand in her care. So I concluded that Abena has been short-changed at her Cyto elementary school.

I wish I could peep into Abena’s soul to find out what bothers her, what sorrows are brewing deep in her soul, what tears are lurking behind her tender eyes, what she desires for herself, what she obsesses about, what she rebels about, the specific thoughts that flourish in her stream of consciousness, what gives her joy, and..... Does she ever think that nature has given her a lowdown dirty deal or that she is very lucky to be living in Accra and going to school, any school?

Later that night, I went on a trip down my own memory lane to my early days when I collected shreds of old newspapers, the throw-away rejects from my 'bofrot' aunt’s entrepreneurial venture. I used to put the pieces together to form my main reading material. Now, with plastics replacing old newspapers as wrappers, there would have been nothing for me to read. But most importantly, just a few decades ago, pupils from ‘Cyto’ schools, including timid little me, could still qualify to attend one of the three universities in the country. It was a matter of working hard, with a few strands of luck in your stars.

Better questions to ponder over are: What could have become of Abena if the public educational system had not become sub-standard in our 54 year-old Ghana? Abena could have become a lot more in life if she had been dealt a better deal in education. What happened to all the rhetoric about the girl-child? We even have a Ministry of Women and Children, yet issues of females and children continue to lay flat and deep in the gutters of national agenda.

Wasting the lives of our youth:

Cyto education of today is a guaranteed recipe for the youth to get stuck at low-level jobs and in lives with little hope. These days, how many young people who begin life in the middle-of-no-where-Ghana would become anything of essence in society? Specifically, how can this fruit seller’s daughter dare to aspire to become anything beyond a fruit seller? How can she dare to aspire to become a scientist, a medical doctor, the president of Ghana or at the barest minimum, to become a teacher, a nurse, a secretary, let alone a parliamentarian?

The next few days would be March 8, International Women’s Day. As I think of the fruit seller’s daughter, my mind continues to go haywire, fast and furious, imagining several possibilities for the fruit seller’s daughter. Straight up and simple, she might become a trader of some sort in future. That is a no-brainer. It’s also likely that some bloke will give her a romantic knock-out of some sort before she graduates from the teenage years. And with that, we’ll have another teenage pregnancy and the fruit seller’s daughter, she herself still a child, will give birth to her own child.

A Million Woman March:

In the provisional results of the 2010 Population and Housing Census, females came up tops, constituting 51.3 per cent of Ghana’s population – almost twelve and a half million (12,421,770). With females outnumbering males, it’s about time we revisited the matter of the dilemma of gender inequalities and inequities. Abena is only a slice of our social history; of a lousy public education system, of youth who are being wasted.

How does a country develop and thrive when females, the fifty-plus per cent majority, sit on the side-lines to cheer on the minority male population to run affairs? The paucity of women in the national space must be troubling to everyone. A cursory look at the economic geography of the world reveals to even the most unsophisticated observer that countries caught in the thorny throes of stinky poverty and underdevelopment are the ones with the majority of women operating on the fringes.

This phenomenon makes perfect sense for after all, how does one work productively with one arm tied behind the back? How do you bath well with only one arm? You do so unless you absolutely have to because you have only one arm. Females constitute that second arm. Everyone has at least one of these: a mother, sister, daughter or aunt.

So in the spirit of what is happening in northern Africa and the Middle East, where citizens who are fed up with oppressive regimes have taken to the streets to demand their rights, the females of Ghana, the fifty-one plus majority of our population should also take to the streets for a ‘Million Woman March.’ The march should be attended by both men and women who are pro-women. This is an admission that not all women are necessarily pro-women. There are men out there who believe in the cause of women more than some women do.

President Mills and his government promised a 40 per cent appointment of females to public positions. It’s past two years into his administration and he has not delivered on his promise. A key demand from a Million Woman March will be to insist on cashing the president’s promissory note. Women will not be asking for too much. It’ll be a very reasonable demand to ask for a fulfilment of a promise. This will be absolutely magical.

How would you manage a GHc2000 funeral donation?

Correta Scott King, wife of the late Martin Luther King Jr., the assassinated African American civil rights leader, made the following profound observation in describing non-violence. Her observation is relevant in reflecting over corruption. She said: ‘It’s a spiritual discipline that requires a great deal of strength, growth and purging of the self so that one can overcome almost any obstacle for the good of all without being concerned about one’s own welfare.’

Some issues call for deep thinking. Corruption is one of such issues. Corruption comes from a deep place. It’s from a selfish place where one’s concern is solely on the individual welfare, without regard to the collective survival. A scenario is presented below that taps into the core of our moral fibre, deep into the intra-personal ethics of each individual.

Intra-personal ethics is ethics that comes from the very core of one’s being. It is one's essence; what he/she stands for without being prompted. Your intra-personal ethics is what your sense of self directs you to do when no one is watching you but you do it anyway because at your very centre, you believe that it is the wrong or the right thing to do so you choose to do it anyway.

Some soul searching questions: What are some of the things you will not do, no matter the circumstances? How do you know that you would not do them? Have you been exposed to those challenges and temptations before to know that you’ll pass the test? What internal processes do you go through to decide that you would not do that particular thing? When intra-personal ethics is strong, a decision comes very easily and instantly.

The scenario below was told by a colleague, Mr Emmanuel Fianko, during a workshop I attended recently on the Public Procurement Act. Ponder over the story and ask yourself: What would you do in the situation? The scenario can prompt deep thinking and challenge your sense of intra-personal ethics. I call it the GHc2000 funeral donation. For good effect, I’ve made up and added a few details of location, date and names to the original story.

The two-thousand cedi funeral donation:

In October 2010, a state-owned organization (let’s call it the Ghana Natural Assets Company – GNAC) placed newspaper advertisements to invite qualified companies to submit bids by 25th November 2010 for a national competitive tendering to undertake a certain government contract. The GNAC formed a five-member tender evaluation committee made up of its senior staff. The committee’s sole task was to do due diligence to the bids by selecting the best bid based on a pre-determined criteria. The committee began its seating immediately.

The following week, one of the members of the committee, Mr Samuel Agyei (not his real name of course), lost his 74 year old mother Madam Ama Okyerewa of Nsawam in the Eastern Region. The funeral was scheduled for the weekend of 16th February, 2011.

One of the bidders, Mr Prosper Dzotepe, happened to hear of the death of Mr Agyei’s mother and made it a point to attend the funeral, uninvited and unsolicited. On the day of the funeral, Mr Dzotepe wore the traditional black cloth, thrown around his rounded shoulders. At the funeral, he made a donation of GHc2000 at the family donation table. It was the largest donations made at the funeral. He collected a receipt from the family and left his business card with clear instructions that it be giving to Mr Agyei. A family representative handed over the business card to Mr Agyei and informed him of Mr Dzotepe’s donation.

Some insider details: Mr Agyei and Mr Dzotepe had never met. They did not know each other. They were not friends.

Do you see any conflict of interest in this story? Was the GHc2000 a gift or a bribe? If it wasn’t a bribe, then what was the real motivation inside Mr Dzotepe’s brain tissue for giving such a fat donation to Mr Agyei, someone he didn’t know? If you were in Mr Agyei’s shoes, what would you do? Return the money to sender? Or, Ghanaian culture is such that it would be considered rude and inappropriate to return a funeral donation to the donor? Should this donation not qualify as an act of corruption just because it is a funeral donation?

Was Mr Ampofo’s presence at the funeral a business trip or a trip borne out of our rich tradition and culture to show love for the departed? Would you attend just any funeral at all and throw money about in the name of culture? Is our cultural arena choked with opportunities for bribery? Does corruption run through the blood and the veins of our culture, and like a trap, waiting to snatch and draw us into unwholesome practices?

Would you say that because the family members had already taken the donation and issued a receipt, the bribe had already been accepted therefore it cannot be returned? Has Mr Agyei already been corrupted and become entangled in this web of corruption in the name of a funeral donation? Should he keep the money and resign from the committee as a way of saving him from conflict of interest? Should he inform the other members of the committee of the fat funeral donation he has accepted?

If you were in Mr Agyei’s shoes, would you pocket the money and smile all the way to the bank for after all, you did not ask Mr Dzotepe to bring you that donation? Does our culture of gift giving negatively impact on our sense of conflict of interest? Is there a difference between a gift and a bribe? How do we differentiate between the two?

Attempt to answer the above questions for yourself. As you slowly and calmly process your own personal answers, think of further questions and sort out your own sense of intra-personal ethics. If, in the depths of your being, you do not find anything wrong with keeping this funeral donation, then go take a hot shower.

Of pigs, goats and sheep:

As food for thought, here is an Aesop fable entitled: The Piglet, the Sheep and the Goat. It goes: “A young pig was shut up in a barn with a goat and a sheep. On one occasion when the shepherd laid hold of the pig, it grunted and squeaked and resisted violently. The sheep and the goat complained of the pig’s distressing cries, saying: ‘He often handles us and we do not cry out.’ To this, the pig replied: ‘Your handling and mine are very different things. He catches you only for your milk. But he lays hold on me for my very life.’”

News stories about corruption abound in the mass media – our own way of grunting and squeaking and resisting. May be as a country, we are not resisting violently, yet. But the abundance of stories about corruption as well as the deep perceptions of what appears to have become a national canker suggests that it has laid hold on the very life of our country. Corruption milks and wounds Ghana, and strangles the life out of our country. Collectively, we symbolise the lives of the goat, sheep and pig. Not pretty.

dorisdartey@yahoo.com; dorisdartey.blogspot.com

Living in Disharmony with Lady Atlantic

A cesspit emptier dumping untreated excreta directly into the Atlantic Ocean at Ngyiresia, a suburb of Sekondi

In two weeks, it would be 6th March and Ghana our beloved country would turn 54. As is the convention, the following day (Monday) would be a public holiday and some Ghanaians who live close to the Atlantic Ocean would head to the beach to have a jolly good time. Some would just stand and play in the sand because they can’t swim. Some would dip into the waters to have a swim. In the standing, playing and dipping, they would deal with indescribable filth.

Increasingly, I wrestle with my Ghanaian self when I visit the beach and/or eat sea food. I grew up along the Ada beach. I used to love to be soaked in the bluish cold salty waters to wash away my childish funk by standing in the beach sand until my feet became planted with the on-and-off tidal waves of the ocean. No more! Now, all I can allow myself to do is to get as close to the sea as possible and just watch, staring hard into the mystery of the universe, and of creation itself.

If you haven’t noticed, our national funk is showing itself off in sections of part of the Atlantic Ocean. A garbage dump has developed. The colour has changed from nature’s blue to a certain shade of brown. This situation should be frightening and disturbing to every lover of nature.

In Les Miserables, Victor Hugo wrote, ‘The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers…. The sewer is the conscience of a city.’ The Atlantic Ocean has become a sewer, a giant pot of soup filled with assorted pieces of garbage, a petri-dish of some sort. Ghana‘s conscience shows in what continues to happen to the sea. Taking a dip in the waters of the sea is not what it used to be. Why would you bath in filth? And the filth is two-fold: garbage and excreta.

Atlantic as garbage dump:

In the past year, I spent some time sitting at a little distance at the beach in the general neighbourhood of the Independence Square as my favourite way of connecting with nature. I prefer the ocean to the forest because the sight of it gives me peace that passeth all understanding. The sight still exudes peace but peace that is associated with human foolishness. It is now a common sight to witness the sea vomit garbage, in bundles.

The garbage is of varied sizes and textures. As you watch, a fascinating thing happens. Garbage floats on the waters, tossed up and down, back and forth. As if by a magnetic pull, some garbage attracts other garbage and if you watch long enough for about one hour, they begin to form a certain sisterly/brotherly union. As they get together into a lumpy embrace, the sea unburdens itself by ferrying the garbage to shore.

As the garbage lays helpless, a kind tide comes along and with the knock-about motions, cause the vomited garbage to change its shape. At one moment, the garbage might look like a human being, sleeping in foetal position. At another moment, it could resemble a log of wood. But after some time, since the garbage has nowhere to go and just lays there, and the knock-about motion of the currents continue, the ocean begins to wash off and take away some of the garbage back into its ageless bosom.

This is the garbage dance. The Atlantic Ocean does not know what to do with the garbage we bequeath to it. It hates it so it constantly vomits it back to land. But since we don’t clean our beaches regularly, the garbage remains on shore, at the mercy of the currents, to be tossed about over and over again.

The Matter of Human Excreta:

Much of the excreta of the population that live along the beach is dumped into the sea. Here is how. By some ‘ways-and-means’, the Waste Management Department of the Accra Metropolitan Assemby arranges to have the stuff from the capital city collected. Then, all roads lead to a spot at Korle Gorno – not too far from Ghana’s premier hospital (the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital), dubbed ‘Lavender Hill’ because it smells so bad. As Accra sets the example, Sekondi/Takoradi follows suit.

In both cities, once upon a time, equipment installed to scientifically treat the excreta to make it safe and acceptable to be dumped into the Atlantic Ocean broke down about a full decade ago. Yet, these cities disregard our safety and continue to dump untreated stuff directly into the ocean. By international laws and conventions, ships are not allowed to dump waste into the ocean. They are required to bring them to land for proper disposal. So why is it that we take our waste from land and dump into the sea?

Considering the recorded 28 percentage growth in the provisional figures of the 2010 National Population and Housing Census and the increasing rural-urban migration, one can sadly say that the quantity of human excreta to be dumped into the Atlantic Ocean will also increase in due course.

Road-map to Atlantic harmony:

Despite our super-zealous Christianity, we treat the Atlantic Ocean with so much disrespect. Chances are that there are some laws in our books that abhor treating the ocean as a garbage dump. Democracy without law enforcement is nothing but a voting system.

A clause in the law establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA Act 419, Section 13, Sub-Section One) states: ‘Where it appears to the Agency that the activities of any undertaking poses a serious threat to the environment or to the public health, the Agency may serve on the person responsible for the undertaking, an enforcement notice requiring him to take such steps as the Agency thinks necessary to prevent or stop the activity.’

There we have it! At least one government agency has the mandate to stop the defilement of Ghana’s side of the Atlantic Ocean. My checks reveal that the EPA is not adequately staffed to make it effective enough to do right for Ghana in ways that will be fully impactful. So whoever is responsible for adequately strengthening and equipping the EPA should just do it if we consider our land, air and waters critical to sustain our lives as a people.

For starters, the EPA can at the barest minimum, bring to book, the leadership of Accra and Sekondi/Takoradi and give them six months to stop dumping untreated excreta of about six million human beings directed into the Atlantic Ocean.

Regardless of the location of their constituencies, Parliamentarians spend much time in Accra so they also contribute their honourable excreta into the massive whole that is dumped into the ocean. They should therefore add their honourable voices and push for a solution to this nasty offensive disgraceful and unconscionable situation.

Since the excreta we’re talking about include that of the President of the Republic of Ghana, His Excellency the Professor should also intervene and add his all-powerful voice to effect change. No, he should give a directive and order for a solution. Period!

Ghana is too busy at the baby-making factory

Finally, Dr Grace Bediako came out with the preliminary results of the 2010 National Population and Housing Census, the fifth census since Ghana’s independence. Setting the 2010 figures against previous census data lays bare our national population story. It’s not good. We are on the loose. We’ve lost control. Our population growth rate is frightening.

Even a quick look at Ghana’s population growth trends paints a shocking picture and indicates that over time, we the people have the capacity to fill up every inch of space of land in this country with human beings. It appears that while everyone looks on, even people with no mojos are also busy populating the earth. Left to us the individuals alone, we would turn our bodies into baby-making factories regardless of whether we can afford to take care of the children or not.

Ghana’s population growth must be declared a national crisis issue. We must have a national conversation about how to put a lid over this pressing matter. If the current trend of population growth had been a disease, it would have qualified as an epidemic. And this should be. Here are the bare facts, with a simple trend analysis.

Baby-Making Escapades From 1961 to 2010:

The first population census after Ghana became an independent country was conducted in 1961. We recorded a population of 6.7 million as our post-independence baseline figure. What a manageable number! But just nine years afterwards in 1970, we increased to 8.5 million, a 27 per cent increase. Fair enough. Still manageable.

But by 1984, we had almost doubled the 1961 figures and Ghana’s population stood at 12.3 million. Note that the 1970s through 1980s were some of the worst periods of Ghana’s underdevelopment when adventurist soldiers toyed with our governance, rudely moving us through redemption, liberation and revolution – all of no consequence whatsoever.

What baffles me is that during that volatile period, in the midst of famine, torture, fear and hopelessness, we did not relent in the baby-making arena. In the midst of the storm, we sought for solace in warm embracement. So it happened that in spite of our national challenges, we continued to be happy and busy at the groin region, and by such reckless acts of embracement, doubled our population in two decades.

Owing to our industriousness at the baby-making factory, by 1990, our population stood at 17.2 million. Ten years later in 2000, as we entered the new millennium of the Twenty First century, Ghana’s population was about 18.9 million; definitely unmanageable, but still counting. In the most recent census last year, preliminary estimates place our population at 24.2 million.

These figures imply that during the Fourth Republic alone (from the 1990s to the present; in two decades), we have shamelessly (or proudly, depending on your vantage point) topped up our population by about seven million human beings. Eh!!!!!

No wonder the number of young people who sell odds and ends by our roadsides continue to increase and youth unemployment is on the high. These are the children of the Fourth Republic – young, vibrant, unemployable, under-employed or unemployed. And chances are – that they are without hope for the future.

Our population growth trend also implies that since we cut off our apron strings from the Queen of England to become a nation state, in a spate of fifty years (1961 to 2010), Ghana’s population has grown from 6.7 million to the current 24.2 million. Simply put, we have almost quadrupled our population since independence.

Eh!!!! If Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah should make the mistake of popping out of his plush grave to see his Ghana, he would not recognize our plumb number as against the number of people he inherited at independence.

The rate of our population growth is not sustainable by any stretch of the imagination, whichever way we cut it. We can’t afford it. We can’t manage it, not even with our newly found crude oil status.

If we are to continue on this path of excessive population growth (uncontrolled, encouraged, praised, expected, prayed over), if we continue cranking up the baby-making machine and each of us consider having a baby as the main reason for which God made us – just to populate the earth – then by Ghana’s centenary celebration in 2057, this land will be choked with people.

Even if our population does not quadruple like it did from independence until now but just doubles, there would be about fifty million people on this small land (238,533 sq km – 92,098 sq miles). Fact: The size of our land will not increase. It is reducing. The Atlantic Ocean continues to claim some of our land so by 2057, we would have less land.

A country’s population must be planned; it should not be left to grow organically. What is troubling in the arena of Ghana’s population growth is that it has not just been placed on auto pilot, but that it receives extraordinary encouragement. I dare say that child-making is the one single aspect of our national life that receives the most encouragement than any other.

Baby-Making Obsession:

Baby-making has become a big time business in our country. It is an obsession. It is driven by desperation. It is a life or death endeavour. For women who experience difficulty in getting pregnant, they easily move into a full-time pursuit, with nothing spared.

Desperate women go to unthinkable places and lengths in pursuit of miracle pregnancies. They visit churches, Mallams, fetish priests, drug peddlers, hospitals and anything that propagates hope in their hot pursuits for children. Their lives literally pause, rudely interrupted, while in search of a baby.

Ghana’s population has therefore been left inside churches and prayer camps over intense prayer and fasting. Churches even spring up and operate successfully with baby-making miracle works as the main agenda as if that was the reason Jesus came.

Our society is so unforgiving of people who do not have children. They are looked down upon; they are openly disregarded and gossiped about. They are adjudged failures in life.

Enduring Questions:

Is our culture and super-religiousness creating the obsession for babies, and the urge to have one’s own womb/groin child as against adoption? But must everyone have a child? Some people are not just cut to be parents. However, owing to cultural and religious pressures, everyone seeks to check out their names at the baby-making factory.

Why did this country abandon the aggressive and successful family planning campaigns of the 1980s? Did we solve our population expansion problems or we decided that population control was unimportant?

Something I learned during my school journey is that when you embark on a campaign to effect behavioural change and you stop, progress made does not remain constant. Rather, retrogression can set in and push you into a state worse than the start point of the campaign.

Any successes gained from the family planning campaigns of the 1980s have been mercilessly bombarded and effectively squashed and destroyed at the altar of religious promotion of child birth.

Do we need to embark on a cultural change campaign? Isn’t it about time we embarked on a very aggressive family planning and baby reduction campaigns? Yes, it is past time.

Low-cost Third World attitudes in a little oily country

Third world attitudes are low-cost, big time. You doubt it? Take a cursory look at just two examples: the way we throw garbage away by-heart (‘ba-hat) and the way we drive, recklessly. Attitudinal change is so difficult. Without a doubt, as a people, we don’t have a maintenance culture, a safety culture, a monitoring culture, and an enforcement culture. A culture underlines and defines ones way of life. It shows in traditions, practices, behaviours and attitudes. Positive ways of doing things are at the heart of a nation’s development.
Enters oil waste:

A 28th January 2011 news story filed by Moses Dotsey Aklorbortu, a Daily Graphic correspondent carried the headline, ‘Waste oil pollutes Axim coastline.’ In the story, it is asserted that the waste oil, also known as tar-balls, might have originated from ships that currently frequent our coastline as a result of increased activity over our crude oil find. This means that the waste did not come from Jubilee Fields. Fair enough.

But the story also mentions a major bottom-line matter: ‘The inhabitants of three communities in the Axim municipality — Amanfukumam, Akyinim and Brawire — who are mainly fishermen, cannot use their beaches as a result of the development.’ Sadly, the Ghana Maritime Authority (GMA) could not identify the culprit ships, implying that the ships have gotten away with what should be a criminal act against the state of Ghana. But more seriously, it also suggests that we’re either not equipped to shine our eyes, or we’re not vigilant enough to pin down offenders in this sticky crude oil business.

Clearly, oil waste is going to become a problem for Ghana, thanks to our newly found status as a commercial oil producing country. But oil waste presents an unchartered territory for us as a country. Yes, we’re very excited about the oil, but mere excitement aint’ just good enough. The fact of our matter is that we’ve never been this road before. During about forty years of the lifespan of Ghana, we were fortunate enough to have stayed in the territory of old waste, comprising of your mother’s throw-away fufuu, goat meat and fish bones – which easily decompose and become one with nature.

Then from no-where, without the courtesy of an announcement, sophisticated wastes like plastics, old computers and fridges arrived on our shores. We haven’t yet figured out how to manage these waste. We’ve been busy stuffing up our land with complicated waste. With the exception of Kumasi and Tamale, we don’t have engineered landfills. Recently, the oily twin-cities of Sekondi/Takoradi resumed the construction of an engineered landfill. The point being made here is that oil waste is an even more complicated waste and we need to sit up to ensure effective management, or else.......

For crude oil to become a blessing and not the feared curse, oil waste must be managed well in a strict, disciplined, efficient, state-of-the-art, matter-of-fact manner with absolutely no room for national foolishness. Even in the small matter of waste oil from vehicles, fitting shops continue to dump such oil indiscriminately into the earth. Cumulatively, if we should add the waste oil from all the fitting shops in Ghana, region by region, district by district, such used oil will amount to a large quantity on a national level. What is the oil waste tracking mechanism at fitting shops? The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must come up with an answer to this question.

Oil waste is oil waste. If we haven’t effectively managed used oil from fitting shops, what’s the guarantee that we have what it takes to manage oil waste from ships that are just passing through Ghana, and what would directly or indirectly originate from our own God-gifted crude oil?

Oil waste is anything that is generated from the production of crude oil. This includes equipment, chemicals, oil leakage, empty barrels, batteries and sand, among many others. Imagine if a barrel of oil spills in a compound house. The oil will drift and dirty anything that comes its way including sand, walls and human beings. Cleaning up is tough and requires painstaking effort, time and money.

There should be no room for our low-cost waste management attitudes in our newly found crude oil country. Oil waste is hazardous waste, straight and simple. As a country, it has been said by many that we’re not good at enforcing our own laws, which we have in abundance – well-written with the best English even the Queen of England may not be able to muster and comprehend.

While trying to fully grasp the challenges we’re to face as a country over oil waste, either offshore in the Atlantic Ocean or what arrives onshore from for instance, oily barrels that end up in private hands and used for water storage in homes, the EPA should try a basic law enforcement regime on a disgusting matter.

EPA, sue the AMA

Not a matter of once upon a time, but rather, recently, the Mayor of Accra, Mr Alfred Okoe Vanderpuje, became a tax collector. He woke up one day and did the rounds of government institutions to demand what they owe the AMA in property rates – with journalists shining their publicity lights on him. This was a fantastic event. This incident probably places the Accra Mayor in the club of pace setters.

The EPA can copy this grand act of leadership and toughness and courage. Simply put, the EPA should take the AMA to court to force the hands of the assembly to live under the rule of law. Here is one of such violations. At what is known as Larvenda Hill at Korle Gorno, the AMA continues to dump untreated human excreta, raw, into the Atlantic Ocean and by that, flout the laws of Ghana with impudence, under the cover of officialdom. Eh, this happens every day and the EPA is just sitting there doing nothing, feeling helpless?

EPA, you have a simple matter in your hands. Emulate the example of the AMA by suing the very governance system of Accra, for perpetrating this grand act of environmental law violation. Force the hands of the AMA to do the right thing by and for Ghana. After setting that precedence, the EPA should head to the oily twin cities of Sekondi/Takoradi and take legal action against the Sekondi/Takoradi Municipal Assembly (STMA). Why?

Like Accra, the crude oil hub of Ghana also dumps its human waste into the same Atlantic Ocean that is gifting us crude oil. What kind of disrespect is that! An ocean gifts you a gift of a lifetime and the way you say thank you is to insult it with human excreta? With the fast increasing population of the oil city, the quantity of human waste to be dumped into the ocean will also increase.

Oh, if only the Atlantic Ocean could talk! It’s the same ocean that carried our kith and kin in chains in slave ships to work to build other people’s civilization while ours remains stuck in a development funk. But today, we violate the same ocean with our stuff. Why isn’t the EPA taking these so-called decentralized assemblies to court for such violations? We’ll watch.

dorisdartey@yahoo.com; dorisdartey.blogspot.com

Thoughts from a Middle Income Dream Factory

I’m yet to recover from the bold pronouncement by the Government’s Statistician, Dr Grace Bediako, on the dawn of November 2010 that Ghana my beloved mother/fatherland has become a middle income country. She flaunted some figures to prove her assertion. As they say, ‘book no lie’; and by extension, statistics should also not lie. But book can lie, and statistics can lie too – big time.

You, dear reader, might also be floating in the surprise of the sudden change of Ghana’s status as economy classifications go. I was away in our West African neighbourhood of Liberia when the smart lady made that big pronouncement. So I missed the news.

On my return, by sheer coincidence, I overheard someone say in passing, ‘Now that Ghana is a middle income country…..’ I exclaimed, ‘What!!!’ He responded, ‘Oh, it’s true. Ghana is now a middle income country.’ I asked, ‘When did this happen?’ ‘How do we know for sure?’ I was left dazed. I looked around me and realised that nothing had changed in my absence. I went to bed that day very confused, with deep suspicion that this announcement will fail the dinner table test.

Enters Dr Alexander Appiah Koranteng:

In my effort to resolve my confusion owing to my vast knowledge gaps about such matters, I sought for wisdom from a big name in governance and public management reforms. He’s Dr Appiah Koranteng, the National Coordinator of the erstwhile National Institutional Renewal Program (NIRP). He has extensive experience working for the World Bank and major international institutions. For the past four years, he has worked on reform projects in post-war Liberia and is currently on a reform assignment in southern Sudan – what is soon to become Africa’s newest country. Following is a summary of his remarks.

‘Categorization of country incomes is done by the Bretton Woods institutions for their own lending purposes but member countries have come to accept the three broad classifications of low, middle and high income economies. Countries with per capita income of below $996 are considered as low income. Ghana’s per capita income used to hover around $600, putting us firmly in a low income economy status.

‘Countries in low income economies aspire to move up in classification, to the middle income. Ghana has been on a journey to move up since independence. In the 1970s, Ghana had a negative growth rate, the result of long durations of political instability. However, since the 1980s, Ghana has successfully struggled to come out of the difficult economic times.’

I asked Dr Appiah Koranteng: ‘What should the eyes see in a middle income economy.’ He listed several markers. According to him, ‘energy, water, telecommunications, roads and other basic infrastructure should be fantastically developed. Such developments will support the progressive growth of the private sector in an unprecedented manner. Ghana’s competitiveness on the international market should also be guaranteed.’

He is concerned about (1) the low level of industrialization for which reason big economies like China dump goods on us, (2) the less than five per cent degree of integration of Ghana into the global economy, and (3) the low rate of ICT adoption.

He acknowledges that the real estate sector is booming. Plans to improve the energy sector at Aboadzi and Bui, and current crude oil production, hold promise to solve our energy problems. The banking system, the capital market and the ease of doing business in Ghana have also improved considerably. With such improvements, investors will come and Ghana would someday, truly become a middle income economy. According to him, since countries like Malaysia and India are middle income economies, Ghana should work much harder to compete globally.

He questioned the level of transparency in the release of figures that form the basis of pronouncing Ghana as a middle income economy. He said, ‘It’s important for us to ask fundamental questions. For instance, what are the computations from the education sector that justify it as belonging to a middle income economy? Does the rate of enrolment in schools, the quality of infrastructure or the contributions of education to GDP warrant pronouncing Ghana as a middle income economy? In the health sector, does the patient-doctor ratio fit into the picture of a middle income economy?’

‘Ghana has not prioritized agriculture although it employs over 50 per cent of the population. There is wastage of our human resources because very little is being utilized for the growth and development of our country.’

Most importantly, according to Dr Appiah Koranteng, instead of mere political rhetoric, the leadership of the country must carry the people along if Ghanaians are to share in the experience of living in a middle income country.

My thoughts:

The news about Ghana becoming a middle income economy is laughable. Economic classification is not like some opium that you take and feel high, and pretend that all is well. Forget about the statistics. Dr Grace Bediako, na statistics we go chop?

Just take a cursory look around and classify what you see into worlds. I’ve always suspected that since the international ‘donor’ organizations classified the worlds and put us into the low third, they have done a re-classification that put some of us into 4th and 5th worlds and intentionally decided not to disclose it to us. So now when tweaked statistics suggest that we’ve arrived in middle income, I want to think hard about the assertion and walk away to eat my kenkey and fish.

Consider the state of mental health care in Ghana. Go mental and see! You would walk the streets and back-roads of Ghana in tattered clothes and die by a choked gutter with no one to mourn you. Whatever you do, my dear ‘middle income’ compatriot, don’t ever lose your mind. Keep your mental faculties intact because life in Ghana on the other side – mental illness, what some people inappropriately refer to as mad – is ugly, is inhuman and is unconscionable. It’s nowhere near middle income status. It’s stinky Third-Worldish! Dr Akwesi Osei, the Chief Psychiatrist of Ghana, has been screaming hoarse about the urgency of resolving this matter but of course we don’t mind him.

When are we going to decapitate our low-cost Third World attitudes and behaviours that do not belong in a middle income country? When are we going to stop throwing ‘bola’ (garbage) away ‘by heart’, urinate by the roadside ‘by heart’ and cross roads ‘by heart’ – without apology?

Despite these funky issues, fortunately, Ghana has so much potential to succeed beyond measure to rise even higher than a mere middle income country. But will we continue to sabotage our own success?

You could liken this dance over income status with fishing. Oh, the bait caught the fish. Oh no, it’s a big worm, not a fish. Eh, it’s a baby fish oh! Should I drop the fish back into the river to give it time to grow larger? No, I might as well take it home now and eat the poor baby fish. Then what?