Ghana Hard!!!

Immediately after taking over the reins of power through a coup d'état, Colonel Acheampong's government started experiencing difficulties. The economy, which he accused Professor Busia of mismanaging, took a nosedive and the people started to suffer untold hardship.

Because he had told the world that he was not going to pay any debt owned by Ghana to other countries, he could not borrow any money from such countries.

Inflation started rising and the prices of essential commodities like soap, sugar, milk, toothpaste etc started skyrocketing. Those who jubilated and were looking forward to a bright future became disillusioned and highly disappointed.

In those days there was this 'trotro' driver in Takoradi who used to pick passengers from the Market Circle to Apramdo Barracks. He had this inscription on his vehicle:  'Ghana Hard'.  One day as he was driving to the barracks a soldier stopped the vehicle and asked him why he wrote 'Ghana Hard' on his vehicle and he told the soldier he wrote the inscription because times were hard and as such he could not make his 'sales' to his car owner.

Not satisfied with the explanation the soldier ordered him to come down from the vehicle.  He was asked to hold his ears and frog-jump while saying:  'Ghana is not Hard' After the military drilling and the show of 'soldier power' he was released and told to go and rub the inscription.

The angry and humiliated driver went back to town and narrated his ordeal to his friends who advised him to rub the 'Ghana' and leave the 'Hard'.

He did that and the following morning as he was entering the barracks with his vehicle, the same soldier who drilled him stopped the vehicle and asked the driver why he did not rub the 'Hard' and this was his answer:  'And so if country  hard too, make we no say e hard?. Habba, soldierman?' All the passengers and the soldier busted into uncontrollable laughter. The next day the driver went to a sign writer and asked him to rub the 'hard' and write 'Man de suffer'.

When he was stopped at the gate on his way to the barracks, the same overzealous soldier asked him to explain why this time he had inscribed 'Man de suffer' He had this to say: 'If I say man de suffer I mention any man name?'

The gospel truth is that majority of Ghanaians are living in hard times.  People cannot provide three square meals a day to their families, not to talk of paying school fees and utility tariffs.

The take home pay cannot take the worker to the trotro station and unemployment has reached an all-time high with graduates roaming the cities looking for nonexistent jobs.  Our fair ladies are leaving in droves to Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Libya, Burkina Faso and other places to engage in prostitution.

Able bodied young men have left the villages to the big cities in search of menial jobs but they are not getting them.  Young and beautiful girls from John Mahama's region can be seen carrying heavy loads in pans as 'kayayes'  and their male counterparts have taken over the streets with their wheelbarrows.

In the face of all these economic hardships, contract killing, spousal murder, armed robbery, rape, defilement, incest, gayism and lesbianism etc have engulfed the nation and the moral turpitude of men of God is the order of the day.

Meanwhile, arrant knaves and scoundrels flourish in the empire while mediocrity has been raised to the level of political virtue and integrity is seen as a dangerous deviationist attitude.  Despite the fact that the Ghana Cedi is running like Usain Bolt against foreign currencies, there is a frenzied pursuit of the Cedi by corrupt and heartless government officials.

That is why sometimes my conscience and soul are always rampaged against this arrogance of power being exhibited by John Mahama and his retinue.  When they said he should not borrow he went to Kyebi, thumbed our noses and told us that he will even borrow more because he did not borrow to buy drinks.

Anytime I don my armour of confrontational discourse it is because I don't suffer fools so gladly.  I have listened to NDC apparatchiks praising the government for managing the economy so well and accusing the Kufour administration of running down the economy before the John Mahama administration took over power.

When I listen to such ugly noise my blood pressure rises so high.  John Mahama told us that 2014 was going to be a prosperous year for Ghanaians.  The first quarter is about to end and the illusive prosperity is still illusive.  The naked truth is that the John Mahama administration has messed up the hitherto buoyant economy left behind by Kufour and so they must fix it or forget about 2016.

When mismanagement and corruption by government officials have turned the economy into tatters, the President who has been wearing custom-made suits and living luxuriously with his family and travelling with very long convoy is now asking us to use made in Ghana goods because somebody in Ghana produced a pair of shoes which he wore to Parliament to deliver the State of the Nation Address.

You see, in this country some of our leaders try to make virtue out of necessity.

We were told the same thing when the PNDC was in power.  Because milk was not available in the system during those days, sophists in the land argued that its consumption was a bourgeois luxury.   When General Acheampong was in power in the early seventies and essential commodities became scarce, he too brought a certain Reverent Mrs.

Temple Black, a black American preacher to tell us that cocoyam leaves were more nutritious than the imported food that we were eating and that foreign food was injurious to our health.   Based on that Acheampong too told us that he who is satisfied needed no milk (Obi a wadidi ame nhia milk).

The President must be told in his face that those of us who live from hand to mouth are already using made in Ghana goods because we cannot afford to buy made in 'Abrokyire' goods.  We make do with second-hand clothes, socks, panties, towels etc because we cannot buy custom-made goods from the boutiques.

Can he and his wife be bold and put their hands in the fire and swear to high heaven that they also use made in Ghana goods like we do? That is why I wrote some time ago that the word 'patriotism' is always being thrown about so loosely by our leaders.

They ask us to tighten our Opanka belts while they make sure they wear elastic belts which give room for expansion. They tell us to drink akpeteshie, palmwine and pito but they drink Ballantine's, Black Label and Red Label Johnny Walker whiskies.

If you go to the francophone countries they use foreign goods more than the locally manufactured ones but no one complains because they manage their economies well.  Prices of goods can be stable for decades and you cannot distinguish between the rich and poor as far as the use of foreign goods is concerned.

And above all they don't use propaganda to manage their economies.  They eat mayonnaise, salad cream, foreign perfume rice and top it up with French wine or whisky and wear custom-made suits and imported wax prints.

If an economy is managed well local manufacturers will not complain of anything because they can export their products to other countries to strengthen the local currency.  If the Chinese can imitate our style of wax prints and produce them cheaply for the Ghanaian market why can't our factory also do same?

The truth is that locally manufactured goods as compared to foreign goods are substandard because local businessmen do not have easy access to bank loans to improve upon the standard of their products and if they happen to get one, the interest rates are too high.

And just think about this:  Now that no tobacco company produces Cigar in Ghana who is my co-equal to stop me from smoking my favourite made in Cuba Havana Cigar? Tweaaaa!!!

 By Eric Bawah