Who Are You?

I had barely walked into the Interactive Media department of the company I work with than a colleague asked: “What do you call that plastic thing at the ends of a shoe lace?” For a moment it seemed I was sitting on the hot seat of Kafui Dey’s ‘Who Wants To Be Rich?’ programme waiting to attempt an answer to the penultimate question where one wins GHS 25,000.00. I shrugged and carried out the motive which took me there in the first place, but not after a bout of laughter from them.

It wasn’t after a couple of hours had passed when a colleague from the IT department walked into my office than I remembered the question. This bizarre reminder and quest for knowledge drove me straight to ‘google’ it on my phone. An aglet, it is called. I relayed the answer to him and was given a thumps up. Later in the evening, I again accessed the internet on my phone, and realized I hadn’t closed the tab on which I found the answer to the brain teaser. I proceeded to scroll down to satisfy my curiosity. The webpage had this for a definition:   

I Have A Dream......

As a student of history, I find it almost unpardonable that I hitherto, hadn’t found it necessary to listen to the complete speech made by the doyen of the struggle for freedom in American politics for the Afro-American, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr in 1963. I had heard snippets of it whiles growing up, and seen it referenced in many articles but hadn’t really saddled myself with that kind of research. However, I woke up one morning, and “I have a dream” emerged victorious in the quest for attention in my mind after saying my prayer. Where did it come from? I have no idea. Nonetheless, I also have dreams. I will share one I have on politics.

If this was the picture Kwame Nkrumah and his men had seen when they fought for our liberation, they would not have lost sleep, gone to prison and endured all manner of abuse. I don’t believe the Ghana I have seen for twenty-something years is the same Ghana they handed over to our generation. Successive governments have fought so hard to plunge us into a state of anarchy. Our leaders have happily carried the cross of corruption since independence, and seem to be in the contest of who will outdo the other. They have always said on campaign platforms that they intend to strengthen one institution or another to tackle corruption. Ruling parties have been voted against in elections because they failed miserably to face corruption head on, inter alia, only to find that the next government is actually worse off. They tend to rather build systems that make the menace thrive. They create, loot and share! The mere mention of ‘politician’ in certain quarters will be met with derision because the breed we have in Ghana and Africa are liars. This has led to the game being rechristened ‘politricks’, because that’s what they do essentially – trick us the populace into voting them into office.          

In Ghana,We Celebrate Mediocrity.....

I haven’t yet reached the 100^th page of Lee Kuan Yew’s 729-paged memoir: From Third World To First, but I’m already fascinated by how Singapore broke free from the shackles of poverty and journeyed itself into greatness. With a team of enterprising men and women led by the writer, the natural resource-less country was transformed by the power of human capital and a sheer passion for excellence, and catapulted from a third world country to a first.

My beloved Ghana is undoubtedly a land endowed with milk and honey, but her citizenry is ludicrously fed with manna. We have been served this staple since independence and thus have become accustomed with accepting and celebrating anything that appears a little better than our ‘delicacy’.  

For a twenty-something year old, I carry too much pain in my heart. Pains I think are enough for the faint-hearted to just fall to the ground clutching the left section of their chest and be called to eternal glory. I have witnessed the ordinary being celebrated as achievements worthy of reward in recent past, and I’ll endeavour to catalogue a few of them here [feel free to add yours in the comment box below].

The humiliation from some foreign media calling Ghana a ‘circus’ following the incidents that led to our exit from the world cup still hurts, so I will start my musings from there. Prior to the tournament, the GFA set a clear target for our ‘super coach’ James Kwesi Appiah. His was a semi-final berth for the Black Stars since anything short of that would draw criticism from the many football aficionados in the country. Whether that ambition in itself was realistic is another topic worth debating.