How Can We Rediscover Our Pride? By Cameron Duodu

On my visit to Ghana in July and August 2009, I engaged in conversation with a young University undergraduate. He was ambitious and bright -- so ambitious that he worked part-time and studied part-time. I was pleased, for he reminded me of the days when I was working full-time and yet taking a correspondence course for my A Levels.

When I asked my young friend what he hoped to achieve through his hard work, his brightness dimmed somewhat.

“Nothing can change for the better in this country”, he declared.

I was staggered. If a 23-year-old young man felt so defeatist, then where was this country going?

I asked him to elaborate on what he had just said.
“Look”, he said, “the politicians are in it for what they can get. No-one is thinking about how to move the country forward through proper planning and proper allocation of resources.

“Students can't find enough books in their bookshops or their libraries. Even important national assets like the Padmore Library are being allowed to decay, instead of being rehabilitated and their contents digitised. I read recently that Google has evolved a system whereby it will digitise every book that has ever been published. And we sit here and we can't put books and research materials online. The things to do are all so obvious. But they never get done,” he shrugged.

I felt really sad at this. This is because whenever I am in Ghana and I feel despondent abut how things are run there, I always accuse myself of looking at Ghana through the eyes of someone who lives abroad. Now, here was a young lad who had never set foot outside Ghana. Yet he knew what ought to be done. Only he couldn't see it being done. How frustrating can that be?

I really felt like crying. Was this the Ghana that we had spent the last 50 years “building”?

Ghana was the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve its independence. It achieved its independence a good four years before President Barack Obama of the United States was born.

Yet its government waited until Obama was going to drive on a particular road in Accra to visit a clinic before repairing that road. I was told that at one point, in order to meet their self-imposed deadline, the road-repairers worked at night by floodlight.

This made many Ghanaians feel cheap. This wasn't the attitude with which we embraced independence. We were filled with a pride which fired us to try and build a new nation, and doing it so well that not only would the rest of the African countries be inspired to achieve their own independence, but also, we would prove to the British in particular (who had been our colonial masters) and all the “older” nations in the world, that young as our nation was, it knew precisely what to do to demonstrate that it was equal to any other nation in the world.

In fact, only three years after we achieved our independence, we were able to send troops to the Congo to try and stabilise the situation there, after the Congolese army had mutinied. The Belgian colonialists in charge of the Congolese army -- the Force Publique -- had stupidly taunted the Congolese soldiers by telling them that “la situation après l'independance = c'est la meme chose qu'avant l'independance. (the situation after independence is the same as it was before independence.)

That meant that nothing had changed in the Congo in reality, despite the noise that had been made about independence. The hopes of the Congolese soldiers were shattered by this greatest of insults to their dream of being freed from Belgian colonialism. They arrested their Belgian officers and put them in guardrooms. They then went into town and began attacking Belgians wherever they could find them.

Belgium immediately flew in troop reinforcements to quell the mutiny.

Ghana and other independent African countries rightly saw this as an attempt by Belgium to use the mutiny to reimpose colonial rule on the Congo. So they asked the United Nations to order Belgium to withdraw its troops forthwith and replace them with UN troops.

The UN procrastinated, as is usual with it. In the mean time, the Congolese Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, asked President Kwame Nkrumah for bilateral assistance. Within a mere one week, Ghana was able to organise the dispatch -- some on planes supplied by Egypt -- of 1,193 troops to the Congo, equipped with 156 military trucks and 160 tons of stores. (See W Scott Thompson: Ghana's Foreign Policy 1957-66 --Princeton University Press 1969). About 200 other soldiers were made to "stand by", ready to go as soon as transport became available.

In addition to the soldiers, Ghana sent engineers, doctors and nurses, technicians and artisans of all types to the Congo, many of them flying in by Ghana Airways aircraft, piloted by Ghanaians. The Congolese could hardly believe their eyes and every Ghanaian could hold his or her head high in the knowledge that we had the capability to do our best for our fellow Africans. The whole nation got caught up in the exercise when one Egyptian plane carrying Ghanaians got lost and belly-landed in the Congo River. Fortunately, there were no casualties and the traumatised passengers made a dramatic return home. One picture that was seared into the consciousness of every Ghanaian, published by theaily Graphic, was of an official of the Information Services Department, prostrating himself on the tarmac of Accra airport, giving thanks to Almighty God, for bringing him safely back home.

Ghana's endeavours were later recognised by the international community when Ghana's Foreign Minister, Alex Quaison-Sackey, became the fist African to be elected president of the United Nations General Assembly. The “African Personality” had arrived on the international scene with a vengeance and every Ghanaian who travelled abroad was greeted with great curiosity and respect.

But in 2009, we couldn't even grasp an opportunity to shine to the world when onwe was offered to us on a silver platter. As I looked at the messy and confused manner in which the local and foreign press who had turned up to cover the Obama visit to Ghana were treated, I wondered: How are the mighty fallen! For, in 1957, during our independence celebrations, Ghana put on a special press bus for the foreign correspondents who came to cover our independence. Cable and Wireless company also made special arrangements for them to be able to file their reports without any sweat. And you should have seen the tremendous coverage we got. In 52 years, we had regressed, and were -- as some friends of mine put it -- “wallowing in mediocrity”.

When I visited my home town, which is only 70 miles from Accra, what I saw turned my stomach.

The town's streets are all corrugated into impassable gullies through soil erosion. Driving on the inner streets was out of the question, though, formerly, this was easy to do.

The gutters are almost full to the brim with silt and rubbish. There is now fairly constant electricity, praise be. And running water. But there is no Internet café within miles. Everyone relies on mobile phones, not land phones, which should be ours by right. This is because a telephone system was in existence there, in the colonial days. In fact, it was at the Asiakwa post office that I first heard of the word ”looting”.

(During the 1948 riots which served as the main spark to Ghana's struggle for independence, hundreds of telegrams were transmitted through that post office -- whose postmaster had refused to join the general strike -- for onward rediffusion to the colonial authorities. All the telegrams described a situation of chaos and invariably ended with the words, “Looting!” I did not know what it meant but it stuck in my mind.)

I discovered, to my utter surprise and immense annoyance, that my mobile phone, connected to the new system, Zain, did not work at Asiakwa, less than 70 miles from Accra! What was even more disgusting was that the machine told me it was connected to a transmitter less than ten miles away -- at Osino. Yet it could neither make nor receive calls.

I mean -- what possible evaluation of their services is done of these mobile telephone companies before they are granted their licenses to print money? I had left Accra convinced that I was, to coin a phrase, fully 'communicado,' only to be thrust into a dark, wordless void. Apparently, the thing to do is to take another mobile phone, on a different network, along! Nonsense -- who needs two mobile phones?

But if what I found at Asiakwa astounded me, what I experienced on the way there was a horror story par excellence. I have reported on that in this newspaper before, but I am not ashamed to bring it up again. I used the Accra-Kumasi road (Nsawam route) and also through Koforidua, to Bunso and then detoured back to Asiakwa. The Koforidua route is relatively better than the Nsawam route, but only marginally. There is a section of it which is an excellent motorway. But you have to get from Accra to join it, and the traffic on that route is a nightmare. Once again, our planners have built a nice motorway, but failed to give it equally good connecting roads. We made the same mistake with the Accra-Tema motorway, but have repeated it about 50 years later.

If this haphazard way of doings is all that our young people are getting used to, they might come to believe that it is the norm. And then, they will develop the defeatist attitude which my young friend is cultivating. “Nothing can change in this country,” he says. What could I possibly have told him to change his mind?

Development / Ghana / Africa/ Modernghana.com

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