A toast to Bacchus, Mills and motor cars

Author: George Sydney Abugri

Before President Mills sits down to breakfast every morning or so it would seem, aides hand him a list of top officials all manner of characters and pressure groups in all manner of corners want him to fire before sun-up or else…

Now, don't be deceived by literary and linguistic gymnastics when it comes to communication, Jomo. An ultimatum is nothing but a plain old threat.

It is the peak season for threats and for some strange reason, the president is a favourite target: From public servants hot on the heels of an ever elusive fair wage through his own party cadres and opposition groups to university students, everyone is threatening the president:

Fire Carl Wilson or else…Wilson gets fired. Fire the Managing Director of the Tema Oil Refinery or else…Dr. Ampofo is shown the exit. Sack Upper West Regional Minister Mr. Khalid or else…Khalid gets the boot.

Sack our District Chief Executive before the trouble starts! The president orders Walvis Hudu, Mavis Bawa and Alhaji Sandow to take a walk.

Life is full of uncanny coincidences and these are some of them. The firing of the officials has nothing whatsoever to do with the president acquiescing to pressure from within or without his party. That is what President Mills's aides say.

Coincidences or no coincidences, the agitating foot soldiers of his party are piling the heat on President Mills to show that they mean business with this “or else” thing. Some of them stormed a government facility in Wa this week, disrupted an official meeting and seized official documents.

Now President Mills will have to empty the vaults of the Bank of Ghana and distribute the cash for the agitators to go and spend or alternatively, ensure the exercise of maximum sanction for criminal violence to serve as a deterrent.

That is about the ran-down on the news, Jomo, except perhaps this other bit about what is happening on our roads.

This is not in reference to the mass slaughter of our countrymen and women going on by the minute on our highways only but also to the appalling state of transport management in the capital.

It took a hundred years the other day, but we finally managed to make it to the Nungua Police Barrier from Tema. Then the nightmare began. There was the dreaded fender-to-bumper stagnant stream of motor vehicles snaking alarmingly all the way from the Nungua police barrier through Teshie to the Kofi Annan Peace Keeping Centre!

Glancing at my watch at one stage, I was dismayed to find that moving from one end of a building housing three small street side shops to the other end, had taken about one hour. Soon many motorists were making u-turns at Teshie and heading back to Tema, abandoning the trip to Accra!

This madness goes on routinely along many routes leading to the capital and no one cares. It is unbelievable, Jomo. Absolutely unbelievable.

You would have thought with advanced communication technologies now available, there would be road transport management teams monitoring the traffic flow along major routes and taking remedial measures to ease such excessively heavy congestion.

What happened along all roads feeding motor traffic onto the Tema Beach road and along the Beach Road itself, on Tuesday May 11 and Wednesday May 12 were better seen than described.

On both days, from a point near the Maritime University at Nungua an unending steam of stagnant motor traffic snaked all the way to the Sakumono junction along the Beach Road.

Another dense and stagnant stream crawled painfully all the way from a point near the Sakumono Estates through Sakumono village to the Junction. Both streams then converged and continued the tortuous crawl all the way to Tema.

We need to conduct a medical study to determine what effect this daily trauma is having on health of the population, don't you think?

In the mean time, imagine a matter as mundane as the decision of a university to convert a male hall of residence into a mixed gender hall being whipped up into a big national issue.

The Commonwealth Hall has been noted as a centre of militant, radical and sometimes rowdy student activism in the University of Ghana. This tradition has long been referred to as “Vandalism.”

The dictionary says vandalism refers to the 'criminal destruction or damaging of property, usually public property, deliberately and for no good reason.”

It is uncertain if the name “Vandals” is supposed to be figurative or plain literal but we gather that in the history of the university, this radicalism has sometimes bothered on criminal behaviour:

There have been tales of vandals running around in their birthday pajamas, seizing and throwing visitors including distinguished citizens into ponds and destroying public property.

John Michael Vlach is a member of the United Sates-based Western States Folklore Society which collects and publishes information on folklore from around the world.

In the late 1960s, Vlach came to Ghana to study the Vandal sub-culture at Legon and ended up writing a long research paper titled, “Father Bacchus and Other Vandals: Folklore at the University of Ghana.”

In the book, Vlach writes that “Commonwealth Hall which opened in1958 is largely responsible for the wealth of folklore found on campus. Having its own particular initiation rules, a pantheon of hall deities and a repertory of double meanings and terms, Commonwealth Hall has provided an inspiration for the four other halls of the university.”

According to Vlach, students assigned to Commonwealth Hall or Vandal City, were mainly from regional secondary schools, who contrasted greatly in age with residents of the other previously established halls who averaged 30 to 35 years old.

The Yankee hunter of folklore adds that Commonwealth Hall residents “were considered more spirited, less mature and less responsible by their seniours and were continually engaged in raucous drinking.” {Often to the health of their 'patron saint” Father Bacchus, the god of booze.}

The Online Encyclopedia describes the “Vandals” as “a secret society amongst students at the University of Ghana at Legon, in Accra, Ghana, which “dates back to the colonial period” and whose members are all male.

“The Chief Vandal is chosen by election and his responsibilities include acting as a judge in student disputes and critically, leading resistance against the state and the university authorities when this is required.” That is what the online big book says of the chaps.

A very distinguished son of this land in the person of former UN sectary General Kofi Annan went to the University for Convocation recently and he and his entourage was heckled by a large group of unruly students.

It broke the donkey's, back. The university authorities had apparently been considering ways of dealing with the problem of a controversial campus culture that appeared to have spun out of control in recent years and now here was an opportunity!

In spite of protests and implied threats of vandalism (literally), the university authorities say Commonwealth becomes a mixed gender Hall from now on. .

The university authorities say their motive is not to kill the spirit of student activism. The only change will be the admission of female postgraduate students to the hall.

Author: George Sydney Abugri
Email: [email protected]