The Mystery Of Liberty Avenue

Once upon an incredibly short weekend, I went with the missus to the Tema Community One Market to shop for dry fish fingerlings (Keta schoolboys), fresh cow hide (wele) and some fresh vegetables for a meal of Savanna “TZ', see?

The missus seemed to know her way around and we were done with the task in minutes.

About a month later, I ventured back to the place alone and found myself trapped deep in the Labyrinth of Crete!

Even a veteran bush ranger armed with a state of the art compass of the future will get hopelessly lost in that market if he is entering the place for the first time:

 A labyrinthine maze of needle-narrow passage ways form a very complex network of connecting routes through the vast expanse of stalls and storerooms selling everything with a name.

So hemmed in is this vast but stuffy commercial enclave, that a first time visitor is easily gripped by a feeling of claustrophobia.

So narrow are the passageways through the market that two adults cannot walk abreast through them.

The next time you are in town, visit the place and see things for yourself. It is unbelievable, Jomo.

Absolutely unbelievable. The Lord forbid, but should the kind of fires which are sweeping through markets across the country ever occur at the Tema Community One Market when the place is busy, talking of a possible catastrophe would be an understatement.

There is no way any fire engine can get into the heart of that market place save it were preceded by a fire-proof bulldozer with hydraulic wheels, whatever that might be!

In the event of a fire, it would be practically impossible to get out of the place, not with hundreds of people trying to stampede through those connecting fairy tunnels.

There are no emergency exits in this huge potential trap.

The Abossey Okai automobile spares market at Kaneshie is another national commercial death trap.

If the market has been spared a major fire to date, it is probably because the good Lord Himself would not be able to stand the likely scale of its devastation if one occurred  there.

The market fires which keep breaking out across the country are often attributed to electrical faults.

If that is the case, I keep asking myself why the central government, local government authorities, the Fire Service and the Electricity Company cannot engage in a bit of skull scratching and come out with a solution? Strangely enough, the fires occur only at night, see?

For the umpteenth time, the Kantanmanto market in Accra exploded in massive tongues of fire reaching out for the late night sky on Monday.

Big bonfires were made of colossal amounts of goods and cash in hundreds of shops.

The  Kantamanto Market is not your ordinary market: It is not all the seniour civil servants, pastors, sophisticated looking con-men and swindlers, and even corporate executives you see in dark suits who bought the stuff from Marks and Spencer, Jomo:  Some bought their suits from this famous Market off Liberty Avenue.

In an election year, you can expect politicians to play pscho-poker with such a disaster.

The fire broke out late at night but politicians from the NDC and the NPP were at the scene in minutes to sympathize with traders wailing as if the apocalypse had come.

Do you reckon politicians would have rushed to the scene of the fire were it not an election year, Jomo?

If the answer were truly “yes” then we should have seen political will go into improved fire safety in markets throughout the country long ago, don't you think?

Thanks to this strange phenomenon the investments of thousands of our small and medium scale entrepreneurs in the informal sector of the economy keep going up in smoke.

The rest of the story is that a cyberspace Frankenstein created a creature called the “kangaphant” on the Internet the other day, an apparent reference to a crossbreed between the NPP's symbol the elephant and the party's flagship campaign caper.

Both symbols did merge with party colours at the launch of the NPP's manifesto in Kumasi city this week. Great political statements of party vision and development programmes, these manifestos.

No one takes a party without one seriously. Yet a manifesto could turn out to be no better than the doctoral thesis the arm chair wrote up for a PhD.

He does not get into overalls to fix machines, let alone invent any and it stays a mere compilation of words printed on paper.

The NPP may well be sincere in its intention to take Ghana on a leap across medium-income to first world country.

With poverty and unemployment levels so high, our towns and cities virtually buried under refuse and the delivery of everything from utilities to medical services so fraught with daunting constraints, some may ask if this is some kind of joke.

Like you, I too desire swift and dramatic national progress and would like to aim higher than the stratosphere, but being realistic never hurt anyone, did it now, Jomo?

Realism is the key to efficient planning if you ask me or even if you don't bother to!

Are the programmes outlined in the document sustainable, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound? The last refers to a ruling party's mandated term of office, see?

Hey, Jomo, life can  come to such an abrupt end and we were forcefully reminded of the fact with the sudden death of our youthful Finance Minister Mr. Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu this week.

Many people who wield the kind of power he did tend to be brash, condescending and arrogant but the man was an exception.

The NPP has lost one of the finest gentlemen in our contemporary political history. What else shall we mortals say?

A footnote is that the Electoral Commissioner, Dr Afari Gyan recently painted vivid pictures of possible polling station violence in December due to our bloated voters register.

The man painted pictures of angry party people dragging toddlers and fraudulent adult voters out of voting queues and setting the stage for big trouble.

Yet the man says he is unable to clean up the register himself and suggests a curious remedy: He wants those who have fraudulently registered as voters to own up to the crime and have their names deleted from the register.

To complicate matters, not even the peace activists and democrats are saying what we should do under the strange circumstances to clean up the register. I wonder what is going on.

By George Sydney Abugri