Mrs Asamah's Fish And A Pill

In the Hausa vocabulary of pharmacology, “hanakwana' refers to amphetamines. A Hausa-speaking haulage truck driver acquaintance of mine says he eats cups full of the pills for an after-snack dissert when he is on the highway.

It is dangerous madness, Jomo: When the “hana kwana” has worn off, the driver's  alertness and reflexes fall lower than zero:

The human body can endure only so much physical and mental strain, and then  it reaches that point beyond exhaustion, where it just shuts down automatically like a virus-ridden computer logging off on its own.

That is why every so often a long distance driver apparently snoozing behind the wheel, suddenly ploughs his vehicle smack into a buildings, street vendors, parked vehicles or on-coming automobiles on the highways.

Any reference to road users in Ghana today, must take account of street people. Street people are swarming the streets of the capital like a thousand bee colonies put together.

They work, eat, play, sleep and mate in the streets and many of them seem to know no other life.

You should see the hordes of females among them-girls and young women aged between 12 and 25 or older, clambering up down traffic lamp posts and swinging with agility over street guard-rails carrying their wares like acrobats.

Once upon a very stupid day, two motorists got caught in road rage along the Odorkor-Kaneshie Road. One had apparently driven recklessly into the other's right of lane.

They screamed at each other through the driver's window until the stream of traffic came to a stop when the traffic regulating lights went red close to the northern side of the Kaneshie market footbridge.

One of the motorists, a very hefty chap who is driving a private salon car, jumps out of his automobile, walks over to the other car, a taxi cab, yanks the driver's door open with a mighty roar, drags the cabbie out and begins to give him a lashing with a cane. Only the good Lord knows where Mr. Hefty got the whip from.

Anyhow, the cabbie fights back furiously and soon there is a large crowd attracted to the street bout. Suddenly from the Odorkor side of the road, an articulated vehicle with an overworked bloke apparently napping blissfully behind the wheel, comes at break neck speed and ploughs through the crowd of pedestrians  and street vendors, leaving corpses and maimed bodies strewn around.

Last Sunday, a highway automobile pile-up near Kasoa along the Cape Coast route, killed and maimed street vendors for the umpteenth time.

The Accra-Cape Coast Road appears to be a regular arena for such freak accidents and frequent road slaughter.

Who knows, maybe the road safety people have began taking down notes about these type of accidents for their own preventive activities and for the  benefit of motorists, street vendors, traffic cops and all and sundry. Amen.

A vote-catching episode has been playing out all week and it will be interesting to see which if any, of the presidential candidates will grab at it before it runs cold and out of the campaign agenda:

There is large number of canoe fishermen's votes at stake in the matter. Also at stake are the professional honour of Navy chief Real Admiral R.S.A Nuno and the integrity of Minister of Fisheries, Mrs. Gladys Asamah

One of them is apparently not telling the whole truth with regard to recent questionable happenings in the fishing industry.

You are no doubt familiar with the term “pair trawling”, a curious but apparently rewarding if also most destructive deep sea fishing method in which two large trawlers moving abreast, drag giant nets across the sea bed, sweeping every darned thing resembling a fish, including the fingerlings that must be conserved to replenish harvested stocks.

The Ministry responded recently by banning the so called pair trawling. Then a few strange things happened next:

First, the Ministry of Fisheries decides that it is going to allow fish trawling after all, but only as an “experiment.”

 The objective of this “experiment”, it would seem, was to evaluate the impact of the fishing method on the sustainability of fish stocks.

Then the second curious thing followed: Four fishing companies granted licenses to continue with fish trawling needed to have trawlers for the experiment and so off to the banks they went, where they borrowed hard cash and bought trawlers for the “experiment”, see?

Amid continueing protests from canoe fisherman, the ministry affirmed that pair trawling was indeed depleting fish stocks and therefore  decided on a total ban.

The fishing companies granted exemptions to engage in fish trawling as an “experiment”, came along and pleaded to be allowed to continue harvesting fish using the controversial method, so that they could market their catch and pay back the loans they took to facilitate the experiment.

 Are you riding this drift with me, Jomo?

Then this year's fishing season came with a dismal harvest. News reporters from the Graphic in Tema went to see things for themselves and found despondent and drowsy fishermen snoozing in empty canoes at the beach.

It was accounting time for those we had entrusted with responsibility for managing our fisheries resources and policing our territorial waters.

The Navy blamed the poor harvest on pair trawling which it said, had the blessing of the Ministry of Fisheries.

The navy said it had obsolete boats and could neither patrol our waters nor chase poachers who had much faster boats.

That statement in the media got Mrs Asmah and her Chief Director hopping mad. At a press conference, they denied granting any licenses to foreign companies for pair trawling.

Not that the fact matters, Jomo. Local pair trawlers will do as much damage if not more to marine food resource, as a pair from the Phoenician Islands, see?

Mrs Asamah defended the “experiment” and accused the Navy Commander of not being truthful, insisting the exemption given to four fishing companies to conduct an experiment did not amount to a general license for pair trawling.

They accused the navy of collecting large sums of money from the Ministry of Fisheries to run the same speed boats they claimed to be obsolete.

Someone is short changing us and that makes the issue one of those the office of the President needs to investigate if it has any respect for we taxpayers and voters.

With George Sydney Abugri