Opinion › Feature Article     › 01 Jun 2019

You can't buy Plantain Chips

Day after day, our actions as Africans scare me, and perhaps God even! I once boarded a bus for a journey of fourteen hours or more, with the destination been Accra. Approximately fifty people sat in the bus. It was an air-conditioned bus and as such all windows were closed. I thought it were just closed until we reached a point I thought I needed to open the window. To my shock, the windows were immobile. There was no way you could open it. It was same with all windows on the bus. Only one thought ran through my mind throughout the journey; what happens in an emergency situation? Hours of trying to find answer to this question proved futile. I reached out to the driver at a point in time trying to find out if indeed the windows were meant not to be opened. His answer was yes. "It's an air conditioned bus, we don't need the windows", he said proudly and arrogantly. (You should have seen him). Just then, I wanted to ask him what if there's an emergency. But this I didn't, I shouldn't be seen as the pessimist and devil who's expecting something evil to happen. I decided to only ask him that question when we have arrived.

For the rest of the journey, so many questions kept running through my mind that I never seem to have answers to. Did it take a white man to manufacture that bus? Will the white man permit such a bus to be used in his country? Or was that the reason why they were sent to Africa, Ghana my motherland?

Oh Africa, we are prone to every form of accident and disaster at any time yet we never take precautions. We present our world to be a perfect one, when in reality imperfect could be an undermined word.

A bus vehicle whose windows you can't choose to open even in an emergency situation, is that safe? You know the irritating part? You can't buy plantain chips!

Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here."

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