My Peace Machine

What do you call a sheet of A-4 paper folded in two, with an executive chief managing editor's imprint at the bottom of the back page, which is populated with stale bits and pieces downloaded from Internet blogs and websites, with crumbs of domestic political gossip and propaganda added for good measure? A newspaper!

Fantastic, Jomo. Absolutely fantastic. I have never doubted your genius for discernment of little truths and accuracy of thought and observation.

 We have some of such publications on the newsstands and they are conning we readers of our daily chop money.

Yet while journalism here is still a few millenniums away from Fleet Street, it is nonetheless up and running with admirable gallantry in its pursuit of good governance and official accountability.

There are a few good newspapers by our standards.

 Television is not doing badly at all, if you forgive the pornography and discount the sloppy editing of television news scripts.

With its relatively wider accessibility and the power of its instantaneous reach to audiences on the go, radio is getting better by the day.

There are a few radio stations with a few programmes of quality almost comparable to radio broadcast content in some advanced countries.

That is the good news. Here is snag: If a Third World War (please note the uncanny pun between the historical chronology of global conflict and the popular description of our part of the world), is to break out anytime soon, it will probably break out from a radio station in Ghana in an election year.

The national election peace chant peaked a deafening crescendo this week but those who rightly turned their attention to the problem of abusive, provocative and slanderous phone-in calls, for some strange reason, ignored the problem of dangerous propaganda brewed right inside the studios.

Election propaganda may not be a bad thing in itself and is probably no worse than your average commercial advertisement whose chief goal is to sell a product. How else would a political party sell itself and its candidates to voters?

The problem arises when propaganda is promulgated not from campaign vans but through the sensitive communication medium of radio and programme hosts appear insensitive to the great dangers inherent in studio attitudes not too dissimilar to the “Milles Collins” mentality:

Milles Collins Radio if you remember was the station in whose studios some blood-thirsty, tribalistic elements sat calling on Hutus to go out and exterminate the “inyenzi” (a Hutu word for cockroach.)

Hutus responded by combing Rwanda's hillsides and killing every Tutsi in sight and when it was all over 500, 000 Tutsis had been slaughtered while the world simply took a cool nap!

 I have seen at close quarters, its devastating impact on development and the lives of my people, to condone monkey games with conflict.

The world will probably never know the Bawku we have known: Oppong was a native of the Brong Ahafo Region who built the first one-storey block in the commercial heart of Bawku town in the late 1950s.

The ground floor housed the then famous Oppong Store which sold everything from Horlicks and toiletries to condensed milk and Heinekens beer.

Heinekens came in wooden crates stuffed with factory straw to prevent breakage of the lager bottles.

Dr Nkrumah's representative, the District Commissioner, was just the slightest bit close to a mortal. Bawku was enjoying its historic immediate post-independence economic boom thanks to its location on the border.

First, it was we the Kusasis, the Mamprushies and small populations of Moshies and Busangas savouring the good times, then from nowhere economic invaders came trooping in: Nigerians, Malians,  Upper Voltarians (Burkinabes), Niger nationals, Ivorians and  Togolese traders.

 For every native of Bawku there appeared to be two or three Nigerians, invariably Yoruba.

Bawku was the transit point for a booming trade in cola nuts, salt, cattle and grain between Ghana and many Francophone countries.

Caravans of donkeys came on weeks and months-long treks from the Sahel region through Bawku to Ashanti to sell and buy commodities.

Later trucks took over transporting livestock to Ghana and transporting commodities from Ghana's forest industry through Bawku to their dry land-locked part of the sub-region.

The cargo handling needs of this brisk trade spawned an army of lorry park workers and traditional freight forwarders in Bawku, called the Congo Station Boys.

The vicinity of the famous Congo Station at Bawku used to echo with the choicest swear and curse words from the Hausa language.

They were a hardy breed of heavily built young men with chests like petroleum drums and arms like baobab tree stumps.

As they loaded and off-loaded cargo onto and from trucks, they engaged in fierce fights over the cargo loading and unloading rights, their bodies glistening with sweat as they punched toe to toe in the hot sun.

The era also spawned a breed of well-to-do gangsters who made fairly big fortunes by the standards of the time, from smuggling along and across the borders at Sankasi, Bugri, Werekambo, Kognogo etc.

They were a law onto themselves and went by names like Boy London, Django and Zingaro.

Zingaro made a pastime of beating up policemen and was frequently under arrest for assaulting the Law.

Alabaraka Cinema screened films and Wild West movies. The latter often starred Roy Rogers and John Wayne, and young people picked up such strange words and expressions like “girarahee!” (get out of here!), “sanofabich” (son of a b…h.), “mesuran” (mess around), “hanzzop!” (hands up!), etc.

Then the ethnic conflict picked up post colonial venom and eventually desertification launched an attack on agriculture.

Development has since been so stunted that no one seeing Bawku today, will believe what great times we had and what hope for prosperity there had once been.

There is apparently more to the authorities' concern about security than the threat of electoral violence, though.

A couple of weeks ago, J.J. Rawlings invited former security chiefs of his administration for a meeting. The man is planning a coup, some said.

The former president's aides said JJ discussed the threat to national peace with his guests.

The government has announced that it is banning all six former security operatives who attended the meeting from ever entering any military installation.

What is going on? Darned if I have a clue, Jomo.

All the same, I am so moved by the peace sermons being preached all over the place  that I have invented a peace machine for the benefit of all and sundry:

Genuine seekers of a peaceful election can use my machine. It runs on a fuel mix of fairness, justice, truthfulness, integrity and a total commitment to democratic practice and behaviour.

If you turn it on with the key of sincerity after fuelling up, it works!

By George Sydney Abugri