Letter To Jomo: No Mo Cash, No More Oil!

From a dietician through a taxi driver to the opposition political activist with a wide-open eye on President Mills's almighty throne at the Osu Castle, oil is perpetually terrible news: Let us start with the dietician's galloping nightmare or rather the screaming medical news headline about oil that never, ever gets written:

The nation is swimming in oils high in saturated fats. We fry eggs, fry chicken, fry fish, fry yam, fry plantain, fry pastries, and believe it or not, we fry rice grain! Oil that has already been used in frying food is used again and again.

We are in big trouble Jomo! How do we explain in kitchen language easily comprehensible to housewives and 'chop bar' keepers, the life-threatening and complex physiochemical processes which take place in both the oil and the food being fried?

“Hello auntie Afua, the food in this 'chop bar' is delicious papapa, but the oil is too much." When you fry oils high in saturated fatty acids, hydro-peroxides and trans-fatty acids are formed.

They in turn form free radicals and other undesirable substances which cause cancer and other killer diseases.

(“Papa krachie, what are you trying to tell me..?”) It is a task best left to public health educators!

The other type of oil, on the other hand, is in scant supply or rather a fuel shortage appears imminent and petroleum consumers are doing a great deal of fretting with a little help from opposition political activists:

The former are worried that supplies could run out in the next few weeks, and consumers are compelled to run machines and automobiles on two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.

The latter appear to be making grand capital of President Mills's running around in a fruitless search for crude for refining by our ailing national refinery in Tema.

The impression is being created that the Mills administration has its problem-fixing machines running furiously in reverse gear.

Mills, it appears, has made some desperate efforts to get some crude from Nigeria, Libya and Venezuela without success. Scheduled deliveries promised by the Government have not been forthcoming.

I tell you, Jomo, there is more to energy economics than political friendships, whatever that means.

The global market for oil is very competitive and I dare say at any given time, oil producers supply to buyers offering the highest prices.

Oil economics does not operate on a 'this is my buddy, so he gets some crude” basis, does it?

NDC scapegoat hunters went looking for a culprit and found one in former President Kufuor. Kufuor and former President Olusegun Obasanjo are buddies, they noted.

When Mills came to power, he abrogated a contract under which the Nigerian oil marketing company Sahara had previously supplied crude to Ghana.

“It is him alright…”, some NDC activists grumbled, pointing accusing fingers at former President Kufuor when a ship dispatched to Nigeria returned without a drop of the precious fluid.

There is a very powerful mafia with business interests in the Tema Oil Refinery. Mills has even a few party friends and brethren in the oil brotherhood.

He has received an accurate rundown on things and it is up to him to clean things up if he has a serious interest in a second term of office!

Amid accusations that he had something to do with Mills's oil problems, Kufuor was having problems of his own: Kufuor-friendly media had inflated a colourful balloon of great expectations that the former President was going to be the recipient of the third edition of the Mo Ibrahim Award for African Leadership Achievement. Kufuor's friends tipped him ahead of Obasanjo and Mbeki to win the award.

The award goes with the biggest monetary prize ever: The recipient gets half a million dollars per year for 10 years, then $200,000 a year for the rest of the winner's life. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate gets only $1.5 million, remember?

As the minutes ticked by on Monday, all waited with bated breath for the fine hour. The hour came, and pooff!! (That was the balloon!). The awards committee had found none of the nominees suitable for the award.

The typical African leader lives in absolute comfort at the taxpayer's expense, while millions of his socially vulnerable people just barely manage to get by on the rickety train of daily survival.

Should a citation not go to the former and the cash spent on water, food, medicines and farm tools for the latter?

Ibrahim wrote an article in the Guardian the other time, staunchly defending his choice of beneficiaries: It is intended to discourage African leaders from stealing public money while in office, for fear of post-retirement poverty and the even more grievous sin of trying to cling on to political power at the end of their term.

Unfortunately, the award does not appear to be motivating many African leaders toward good governance at all, and some like Yahaya Jameh, are even becoming international outlaws.

The other time Yahaya Jameh emerged from a bush on the outskirts of Banjul brandishing some herbs and claiming to have found a cure for HIV/AIDS, I speculated that the guy might be a dangerous crank.

He denied that his security goons were behind the murder of about 40 Ghanaians in The Gambia in 2005. After four years of diplomatic wrangling, a plane landed at KIA this week with the bodies of six of our murdered compatriots.

Now, the fat cat is out of the darned bag and we know the man could well be a bloodthirsty hound in the mould of Amin.

People around the world must have scandalised beyond belief, when the man recently threatened that he would kill human rights activists in The Gambia “and nothing will come of it.” I wonder who told this man that.

Let this character keep on at this rate. I would be the last to encourage Yankee gang-ho-ism, but if he believes he can kill human rights activists and get away with it, and then he is probably heading the way of Noriega and Saddam.

With guys like this around, how can we criticise the arrogant posturing of the US in assuming the role of chief constable of the planet? Who else would take them out?

Even if the Yanks don't get him, he might one day go the way of Charles Taylor and the rest of the now deposed gang in the gallery of former rogue heads of state. The impotent African Union has kept as mum as a big clam.

So in Guinea, Moussa Camara's security forces storm a pro-democracy rally and slaughter 157 people in broad daylight. Are we really in the year 2009, Jomo?

Credit: George Sydney Abugri/Daily Graphic