The Kung Fu Pisser … Or The Tale Of My Prepaid Meter

Chief Justice Georgina Theodore Wood issued a stern warning the other day against corruption in the Judiciary. Methinks she should have saved her breath, because by the very nature of their calling, justices of the courts can only be honourable men and women!

Is that not why society has gone out of its way to bestow on judges the power to uphold or take away the liberty of the individual and even more awesomely, the power over life and death? Apart from God, Who else has such power, Jomo?

So, I trust that conscious of the sacredness of such power, the average judge would give no one reason to ever question the quality of his judgements.

I certainly have no doubt whatsoever, that if I hauled the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) to court today to seek redress for its cheating ways, I would be handed a fair judgement.

Ours is one country in the world where it appears perfectly legal for anyone to sell goods and services, receive payment and refuse to deliver the goods or services.

Top of the list of fraudsters and daylight swindlers is the ECG. The company has been swindling me like no 419 business, Jomo.

Last week, they sold me power units which I very happily fed into my prepaid power supply meter, but the ECG, after appropriating some of my hard-earned wages by false pretences, condemned me to sleeping in darkness.

These guys could not have chosen a worse time of the year to indulge their swindling antics. At this time of the year, Accra is one sweltering lake of blazing atmospheric heat and thanks to the ECG, I was well and truly barbecued for days.

Surely, no judge with a genuine wig on his skull and a good conscience in his chest cavity would deny me justice if I dragged these guys before his court to seek redress!

It is from an evaluation of the level of efficiency of the energy sector in this country, that you get to appreciate just how steadily we keep sliding down the cliff of progress.

Warning signs of a power crisis keep coming and going and coming with a very annoying rhythm reminiscent of 1995.

A bit of history never did anyone any harm and, especially not someone already walking backward against the forward flow of time, anyway. In our reverse march, we are almost back to 1995.

That was the year working people who returned home late at night were heard cursing and screaming in pain as they walked into furniture, walls and objects in pitch-dark sitting rooms.

The rationing of power was so stingy that many communities received power supply for only 12 hours every other day.

Infants roasting in the heat cried all night in most homes and many of them developed hideous skin rushes. Deadly nocturnal creatures walked the dark alleys of Accra killing women and leaving their nude bodies strewn all over the streets until at least 34 women had been so disposed of.

I recall feeling terribly sorry one night for a young doctor living close to my block at Dansoman. He arrived home very late that night during a power outage. I flashed my torch playfully over him and there were blood stains all over his clothes.

This young medic has gone and murdered someone, I thought to myself in alarm. It turned out he and other doctors had been working very late conducting an emergency surgical operation which lasted hours.

He was back home for a rub-down and some well deserved shut-eye, and what a reception or rather what an ideal country to practise medicine in.

Nocturnal bandits too had a field day. You would have thought with the grief we all went through, our priorities would have been so determined by now, that another supply crisis on the same scale would not keep recurring, but here we are again, Jomo.

In recent weeks, many lower and middle-income households were busy getting out the standard Third World accoutrements for surviving without electricity: candles, mosquito coils, kerosene lanterns, dry cell batteries and hand fans woven from palm fronds.

In the mean time, those with a powerful political voice to speak on the messy handling of the energy sector have abandoned us to the mercy of the producers and suppliers of electricity. They are busy brawling and pissing.

The more I contemplate partisan politics, the more suspicious I become about the possible motivation of the key actors in this controversial game, which has been traditionally equated with dirt and slime throughout the ages, and please remember that the bit about it being dirty did not originate from me:

Even without being a political zoologist {whatever that means} you can still see that there is something very much amiss with partisan politics.

Don’t you find it very strange that the political species are fighting each other as fiercely as they are fighting other species?

Why would people who belong to the same party and who by implication share the same vision, and should be working together toward achieving that vision become bitter enemies?

What is there for grabs that makes comrades in the same political party willing to break up the party if need be, in their quest to take control of the party and members of rival parties just as willing to sacrifice national unity and security in the pursuit of political power?

This bug that has bitten politicians in the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and had them urinating along the corridors of the party has afflicted the New Patriotic Party (NPP). Dr Arthur Kennedy has written what some say, is a “pissing book” about his party.

I have not read Dr Kennedy’s book. Not yet. I gather though, that it is bitterly critical of the way his party conducted its 2008 election campaign and chronicles reasons why the NPP lost the election.

Do you reckon there is ever any other reason for a party’s electoral defeat than the fact of voters having made a well-considered choice, Jomo?

Anyhow, his party is far from amused with the pissing fad. They think Dr Kennedy appears to have imported from the NDC and Kennedy became the lucky beneficiary of a few invectives:

The book was replete with totally wrong information that could have been easily cross-checked with the party machinery if he had been so minded, he was told.

As I told you last week with regard to the NDC’s internal wars, there always appears to be amusing coincidences between the so-called “pissers” and their internal party ambitions.

In the case of Dr Kennedy, his critics have noted that he spent some hard-earned cash in a bid to become the party's flag bearer during the last election and was rewarded with a couple of miserly votes by party congress for his troubles!