AFRICA AND THE MILLENNIUM GOALS

OF BRANDING GHANA AND THE MILLENNIUM GOALS

The Ghanaian Times Tuesday September 21, 2010

By Cameron Duodu

QUOTE: In the five years since the Guardian first visited the Klutsey family, Hannah has grown into a beautiful five-year-old. Neighbours say she is a lively girl.

However, the family's living standards have not improved. They now have electricity, but still share a one-room hut. "This is not good for family life. How can we still be living in a single room with our children, some of whom are no longer kids, but adolescents?" Benjamin asks.

They still have no sanitation, not even a pit latrine. Their staple diet is akple, a meal made from cassava and corn, which Mary also sells from a stand outside their home. "Meat is too expensive for us. We can't afford that luxury," she said.

At Christmas, they eat chicken and rice, but sometimes lunch is just a piece of bread. To supplement their diet, local children hunt rats. On the day the Guardian visited, thick black smoke billowed from nearby bushes where a dozen children had set fires to force the animals from their holes. One of the boys was Samuel, Hannah's 10-year-old brother. "It's good meat," he said, pulling the skin from a dead rat.

Hannah's eldest brother, 15-year-old Alfred, is already working, although he has not finished school. He proudly shows off the Manchester United jersey he bought with money earned on building sites.

But his spending is a source of irritation for Mary, who reminds Alfred that school term is about to start but the family do not have enough money to pay his outstanding exam fees. "That's my immediate headache," she said.
Mary hopes she "will one day own a big convenience shop", a business she thinks will help transform her family's economic situation.

Her husband, on the other hand, wants the government to support his farm with subsidised fertilisers and farming implements.
"The crops are not doing well, because the rains have not been regular this season," he said as he dug up a cassava root. "This will do for dinner," he said. "We thank God we have something to eat today ... tomorrow will take care of itself." UNQUOTE

In the next few days, a lot of words will be heard at the UN – once again – about the “millennium goals for development” in Africa.

At the Gleneagles (Scotland) summit of the G8 (Group of Eight rich industrial nations) in 2005, the G8, spurred on by the United Nations, followed up earlier promises and made stirring pledges about what they would do to try and to eliminate poverty, disease and illiteracy from the poor nations of the world, especially, Africa.

Five years on, none of the pledges looks as if it will be fulfilled. Mr Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University (who is also a special adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals), says the most important pledge of all the G8's promises was the Gleneagles one which stated that by 2010, they would increase annual development assistance to the world's poor by $50bn, relative to 2004.

Half of the increase, or $25bn per year, would go to Africa, the G8 said.

“The G8,” says Mr Sachs, “fell far short of this goal, especially with respect to Africa. Total aid went up by around $40bn rather than $50bn, and aid to Africa rose by $10bn-$15bn per year, rather than $25bn. The properly measured shortfall is even greater, because the promises that were made in 2005 should be adjusted for inflation.

Re-stating those commitments in real terms, total aid should have risen by around $60bn, and aid to Africa should have risen by around $30bn.
In effect, the G8 fulfilled only half of its promise to Africa – roughly $15bn in increased aid rather than $30bn.”

Ironically, Mr Sachs points out, much of the overall G8 increase in aid, “went to Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of the US-led war effort, rather than to Africa.” (It looks as if as far as the US is concerned, if you want it to increase aid to you, then you should allow yourself to be invaded!)

But in all seriousness, what Mr Sachs reports is no less than a sleight of hand being perpetrated by the G8. He writes:
“Since the G8 was off track in its aid commitments for many years, I long wondered what the G8 would say in 2010, when the commitments actually fell due.

In fact, the G8 displayed two approaches. First, in an ‘accountability report’, … the G8 stated the 2005 commitments in current dollars rather, than in inflation-adjusted dollars, in order to minimise the size of the reported shortfall.

“Second, the G8 … simply did not mention the unmet commitments at all. In other words, the G8 accountability principle became: if the G8 fails to meet an important target, stop mentioning the target – a cynical stance, especially at a summit heralded for ‘accountability’.

“The G8 did not fail because of the current financial crisis. Even before the crisis, the G8 countries were not taking serious steps to meet their pledges to Africa. This year, despite [a] massive budget crisis, the UK government has heroically honoured its aid commitments, showing that other countries could have done so if they had tried.”

If Africa had another $15bn-$20bn per year in development aid in 2010, as promised, (says Mr Sachs) with the amounts rising over future years (also as promised), millions of children would be spared an agonising death from preventable diseases, and tens of millions of children would be able to get an education.”

What this means to everyone in Africa is that we must realize, even more forcefully than before, that we are our own saviours and that we a number photographed by the newspaper should bring enormous pressure on our governments to stop spending money on stupid things while our children are dying from curable diseases, or from sheer malnutrition.

I wrote a column recently about how silly it was to spend precious money to hold a conference to “brand Ghana.” I am sure whoever paid for that conference will be shocked to hear that while hot air was being spewed about “branding” Ghana, a real bit of Ghana ‘branding” was being done in a village away from the air-conditioned conference halls of Accra, for the LondonGuardian newspaper.

The paper sent someone to go and have a look at how a child born five years ago in Ghana – one of a number the paper had selected from across Africa to follow up and see how they would be faring in succeeding years – was growing. This is part of what the paper’s reporter found:

“Hannah Klutsey ran from her family's single-room house with tears in her eyes. A mouthful of bread had lodged in her throat and her eyes were bloodshot and bulging.

“‘Mummy, water!’" she shouted as she struggled to swallow. Her mother, Mary, dropped the bundle of firewood she had carried into the dusty compound and rushed to the huge plastic water pot in front of their ramshackle kitchen.

“She came back with a plastic cup of water, which Hannah gulped down. Only later, when the youngster was recovering on her mother's knee, did they notice the mosquito larvae at the bottom of the cup: half a dozen wormlike creatures writhing in the water.

"The pot must have been left open for mosquitoes to lay eggs in the water," said Mary, whose immediate concern was that her only daughter, who had recently recovered from severe skin rashes, could fall ill again. "She survived her recent sickness by miracle: another illness could kill her," said Hannah's father, Benjamin, said as he emptied the contaminated water from the giant pot.

“There is no running water in Kpobiman, the poverty-stricken community outside Accra in which Hannah and her family live. Like most of their neighbours, the Klutseys use water from a shallow borehole. Others are forced to draw water from stagnant pools, where germs and parasites are abundant.

"The water is so bad you can't imagine this community is just a stone's throw from the city," Jeleelah Quaye, the local assembly representative, said.

“In the past year, more than 300 residents, both children and adults, have contracted buruli ulcer, a waterborne disease causing skin lesions and deformities. Four people have died, Quaye said.

“In the five years since the Guardian first visited the Klutsey family, Hannah has grown into a beautiful five-year-old. Neighbours say she is a lively girl.

“However, the family's living standards have not improved. They now have electricity, but still share a one-room hut. "This is not good for family life.

How can we still be living in a single room with our children, some of whom are no longer kids, but adolescents?" Benjamin asks. They still have no sanitation, not even a pit latrine. Their staple diet is akple, a meal made from cassava and corn, which Mary also sells from a stand outside their home. "Meat is too expensive for us. We can't afford that luxury," she said.

….“Hannah’s father]… wants the government to support his farm with subsidised fertilisers and farming implements. "The crops are not doing well, because the rains have not been regular this season," he said as he dug up a cassava root. "This will do for dinner," he said. "We thank God we have something to eat today ... tomorrow will take care of itself."

As those who attended the “branding” Ghana conference were sitting down to a fine, balanced meal, the proper “brand Ghana” was what was on show to the Guardian. That is what the world will read about Ghana, not some expensively-purchased advertisement or “advertorial” from which advertising agencies collect huge commissions.

Such “branding efforts” are worthless, in the face of the evidence that reputable journalists find and report about our country.

If we want Ghana to be admired, then we must provide all our villages with potable water.

We must make sure that children who go to school are not driven out if they have no money for school fees.

We must eradicate the environmental hazards that produce malaria. And we must build effective and efficient health centres, where our people can go and get good medical attention when they fall sick.

That is the only way in which we can brand Ghana credibly. Everything else is hot air.

what is a nigerian life worth?

By CAMERON DUODU

It has happened again. Is anyone surprised any longer when a “religious riot” occurs in Nigeria?

The latest one occurred -- once again -- in the city of Jos, and the death toll is given as anything between 300 and 500 people. Attackers wielding machetes killed hundreds of people in pre-dawn clashes between Islamist pastoralists and Christian villagers. Bodies were piled in streets.

Harrowing pictures of the dead have appeared in the media. http://www.nigeriannewsservice.com/index.php/Breaking-News/jos-boils-again.html

Many Nigerians, in sheer disbelief, are wondering how Jos, a city in which hundreds of people were slaughtered like lambs as recently as November and December 2008, and where killings continued sporadically into January and February 2009,could have been left to fall into the mercy of marauding religious fanatics again.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7758098.stm

　

Everyone knows that these clashes are periodic, and yet, the police appear to have been taken by surprise by them. Again.

In sheer frustration, Nigerians are asking: “Is there such a thing as a state of emergency that could be declared to protect life in Nigeria? What about a properly enforced curfew?” They are receiving no answers.

The most recent pictures of carnage, coming hard on the heels of the exposure of extra-judicial killings by the police by Al Jazeera television -- which I reported on 4 March 2010 -- have demoralised the population beyond measure.

Indeed, the headline to this story was printed above a story by a Nigerian, Mr Solana Olunhemse, who wrote in the Lagos Guardian newspaper on 7 March 2010, describing in despairing terms, how a horrible picture had been sent to him about another alleged atrocity against bus passengers in Nigeria. Nineteen people died in that tragedy and pictures of their badly mutilated bodies have been making the rounds. The police say that the incident occurred last year, not as recently as the disseminators of the pictures had sought to imply.

http://www.nigeriannewsservice.com/index.php/Breaking-News/jos-boils-again.html

Irrespective of the date of the incident, the pictures caused a great deal of consternation. The Nigerian Senate summoned the Inspector General of Police on 3 March 2010 to explain the action taken by the police against the perpetrators of the crime. The Senate’s anger was aroused after a member, Mr Ayogu Eze, had circulated the photo clips of the scene of the incident.

http://www.nigeriannewsservice.com/index.php/Breaking-News/jos-boils-again.html

In turn, the Minister summoned the Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Ogbonnaya Onovo, and gave him what was described as “an unprecedented tongue-lashing.”

The minister called his own police service “a failure.” He continued: "The current rate of crime across the nation, rising cases of extra-judicial killings, human rights violations, robberies, high-profile assassination and deliberate failure to comply with government directives, are a testimony to the sheer incapacity, or the wilful defiance of [the] police high command of the efforts of the government”.

Reports say Inspector-General Onovo appeared surprised that he and his most senior officials had been called to receive such a dressing-down from the Minister. But the Nigerian populace are fed up with excuses and verbal parrying both by Ministers and the law enforcement agencies. Unfortunately however, the people‘s fears are not about to end some time soon.

This is because Nigeria has only just partially emerged from a paralysis of government caused by the illness of President Umaru Yar’Adua. He has just “returned home” after nearly three months in a Saudi hospital. Hardly any of the top people in the administration have seen him since his return.

He left Nigeria without fulfilling the formalities that would have allowed his Vice-President, Mr Goodluck Jonathan, to rule in his absence. In exasperation, the Senate voted to make Jonathan Acting President.

Even though Yar’Adua is now back, he is still too ill to govern. He is reported to have "endorsed" the declaration of Mr Jonathan as Acting President by the Senate. But there is too much distrust between the “Jonathan faction” in the Government and “Yar’Adua‘s “kitchen cabinet” for the Government to be able to act firmly in the face of a crisis such as that caused by the religious riots.

The distrust has already produced one high-level casualty: Yar'Adua's National Security Adviser, Major-Genera (rtd) Sarki Mukhtar, has been fired. His replacement is Lt.-Gen (rtd) Aliyu Gusau,who held the same post under Yar'Adua's predecessor, General Olusegun Obasanjo. This bold action by Acting President Goodluck Jonathan signifies that the power struggle at Aso Rock, Abuja -- headquarters of the Nigerian fderal Government -- may not be quite over yet.

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so you thought vultures only flew?

By CAMERON DUODU

This weekend (5.3.2010), The New Statesman devoted a full page to an interview with Dambisa Moyo, author and “economist”, in which she was at it gain, going on about how “aid” is useless to African countries and makes them dependent.

http://www.newstatesman.com/africa/2010/03/interview-aid-zambia-jobs

Why the Western media give this woman all that space is a mystery to me. Why don’t they, instead, give the space to another woman who is actually on the ground, not theorising but trying to save lives and improve the living conditions of those she has saved by ending civil war from her society?

I am talking, of course, about Mrs Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia, who, since she took office in January 2006, has been battling with poverty in the country that had been torn to bits by two decades of civil war.

She needs to build schools. Rehabilitate hospitals and clinics. Repair roads. And sink wells to give people water. And above all, give the people a sense that something can be done to lessen their pain.

In all these endeavours, Liberians are volunteering their labour, or working for very little pay. What they need are the tools for the job -- cement, nails, electric pumps, coal-tar, spare parts to repair broken machinery. And the trucks to take people and materials to and from the sites where work is going on.

All these things can only be bought with foreign exchange. And Liberia’s shattered economy has very little of that. But its shortfall in foreign exchange earnings can be made up by carefully targeted aid. Mrs Johnson Sirleaf, having been a banker like Ms Moyo (in fact, she held a much a much more responsible position in a bank: regional Vice-President of Citibank) knows how to make a penny go a long way. But she must first lay hands on that penny.

Yet listen to Dambisa Moyo: “The fundamental problem is that the aid industry has become so pervasive that governments abdicate their responsibilities.”

Mrs Johnson Sirleaf will “abdicate her responsibilities” to an aid organisation? It is not only an insult but a deadly lie, which will, if listened to by the politicians of the rich West with as much relish as the Western media,

only make the rehabilitation of Liberia unnecessarily difficult.

For while Liberia is working hard to increase its exports, such as rubber, timber and iron ore,

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/6618.htm

in order to earn the foreign exchange that will finance its rehabilitation, it cannot do this if the country’s roads are full of potholes; if its ports are incapable of efficiently loading exports into ships and offloading crucial imports from them; and if it cannot import medicine to keep the dock-workers healthy. In other words, without foreign exchange, Liberia will be chasing her own tail.

Now, Mrs Johnson Sirleaf is not the late Mobutu Seseseko. Nor is she Omar Bongo or the panoply of other African leaders, in whose hands money melted into nonsensical expenditures mainly conceived out of the fancies of megalomania.

But Ms Moyo lumps Mrs Johnson Sirleaf together with these African dunderheads when she says “governments abdicate their responsibilities” when they obtain aid. The notion is so stupid it makes one want to tear one’s hair out. If a government is foolish or corrupt or both, then it will do idiotic things, whether with aid money or its own money.

But certainly not all African governments are stupid? For instance, in her interview, Ms Moyo singled out Botswana for praise. But she implied that Botswana is prosperous only because it encourages private investment. What she omits to mention is the wise leadership provided by Botswana’s late President, Sir Seretse Khama and his successors, who have been clever enough to leave the mining and selling diamonds (a highly skilled operation better left to private companies) to De Beers (now Debtswana) whilst keeping a watchful eye on how it goes about its business.

The Government of drought-stricken Mali isn’t stupid, either. But if Western Governments listen to Ms Moyo, Mali should be denied the aid that will enable it to import the fertiliser that can help Mali’s farmers increase their cotton yield -- when the rainfall is good (that is).

I urge Ms Moyo and those who subscribe to her views to watch a programme shown by the BBC TV programme, Newsnight, recently:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8538889.stm

This programme is about the activities of Western companies, known as “Vulture Funds”, which buy up “dead cheap”, the debts of poor countries that contract international debts and are unable to pay them back. Nations such as Liberia.

http://www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk/?lid=2893

One such “Vulture Fund” recently sued Liberia for $28 million and won. The Liberian debt for which $28 million is being demanded was bought at a derisory price.

Countries that allow “Vulture Funds” and other predator companies to use their law courts to screw poor countries like Liberia, bear a responsibility for Liberia’s dying babies and school children, who are sinking into illiteracy. They can fulfil this responsibility by giving such countries aid.

Of course, there are flaws in the aid system. But too much is made of the ineffectiveness of aid. If a project is well thought out by the two sides; if inbuilt auditing of funds is agreed upon; if there is enough flexibility in the disbursement of funds, so as to allow for materials to be sourced from the cheapest sellers and not necessarily from the donor country only, aid for particular projects can be made to work.

I know this first-hand, for Ghana’s Volta River Dam at Akosombo, to whose construction I was an eyewitness, has served the country handsomely since it came on stream in 1966. It was built with aid from the US, Britain and the World Bank. The negotiations for this aid were almost interminable. But it meant there were no loopholes in the project’s profile.

The deficiencies in aid financing are too well known not to be capable of elimination by a pair of countries determined to make aid work.

As for Ms Moyo and her ilk, I request them not to view aid in isolation. They should remember whose slave labour built up the economies of those countries currently capable of donating aid. They should carry out research into the histories of the port cities of Bristol, Liverpool and London and maybe they will appreciate that these cities did not become rich in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, merely because they had good merchants, but merchants who made huge profits from human beings kidnapped from Africa.

Account should also be taken of the amount of profiteering that colonial-style investments in Africa -- buy raw materials on the cheap, ship them in your country’s own vessels “home” to add value, hundreds of times over, to what was paid for the raw materials, and flog the finished product -- enabled Britain, the US, France, Portugal, Germany and Spain derived fro such investments in order to become the rich countries they are today.

If the Governments of these countries give back little bit of the taxes they scooped from the companies as aid to Africa, it is not the act of charity it is often touted to be. It is but a small part settlement of an enormous debt which may not be acknowledged legally, but looms very large when moral justice comes into the picture.

the ups and downs of being a premier football player in the UK

By Cameron Duodu

If one went by the tabloid press in Britain, one would imagine that life as a football star is the worst hell there could be.

You go to a nightclub to unwind after a tough football match, and the paparazzi won't leave you alone to drown the sorrow of not having played as well as you know you could have done, or your mates could have done. Run out of luck for one second, and they will plaster your drunken face all over the pages of the tabloids the next morning.

You prang your Ferrari in the sleepy, wee hours of the morning. Someone gets a picture of it.

A colleague pinches your girl friend a few months after you've dumped her. And they make it look as if you were not only still with her, but that you were married to her and have been cuckolded. They create a hullabaloo which makes your erstwhile friend lose his captaincy of England. All eyes are on you the next time your team plays his. And you play along by refusing to shake hands with him.

You don't ever pause to ask: Are there divorces in this country? Do married people -- whatever their stations in life -- have affairs? Are the editors of the tabloids above taking out a secretary who used to go out with the chief sub but would murder him now if she got a chance?

What bunkum. The tabloids and their readers and those high-minded people who sneer at them but nevertheless monitor their moralising crap with a fine toothscomb, just force the football stars to live in an unreal world -- on the field, off the field and in an imaginary places called "our national life". It's amazing that half of the football stars are not bonkers.

The television interviewers too know damned well that these players are not going to be able to say anything worth noting about the match they've just won or lost. And yet, they will have them come on, faces and hair freshly done up as if they've never tousled their hair in disgust at a referee's decision, to mouth inanities and falsehoods meant to enhance the reputation of "The Game".

Occasionally, though, one of them emerges, not totally scathed by it all. In an interview given by Rio Ferdinand in the London Guardian, the new England captain manages to present himself as such a person -- despite what must have been a relentless effort to lead him down The Cliche Path. He even had something sensible to say about "Wags" (Wives and Girlfriends to the uninitiated.) Here is the full interview:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/mar/03/rio-ferdinand-new-england-captain

To Ferdinand, I can only say one word: Respect.

Keep it up, man. You'll make a great captain if you remain a real human.

Boris The Faltering Bull Is Saved by Viagra

By CAMERON DUODU

According to the Sun newspaper, Boris a bull on the farm of farmer Dave Joyce (see photo) had proved "more of a laughing stock than breeding stock, after failing to finish what he started with a herd of cows."

So it was reluctantly decided that next stop for him was --the abattoir.

But farmer Dave then had a brain-wave: he would try to save the life of Boris with -- a love potion.

Performance ... Boris was given her-bull Viagra to give him a boost

Newsteam

He fed Boris a diet of herbal Viagra for a week. And just two days before the bull was due for slaughter, "Boris had regained the horn."

Or was it perhaps the 'North Pole'?

The farmer explained: "Since the herbal treatment we have never seen him so rampant. When the cows come out - he's the first in there. Now he is totally on the straight and narrow and calves are back on the agenda. It means we don't have to turn him into burgers."

Dave's assistant, Rob Smith, discovered the product on the internet. The capsules include Horny Goat (sic) Weed, Damiana, Avena Sativa and Muira Puama — all claiming to rev up your love life.

Dave added: "Boris couldn't finish off what he started with the cows. For some reason his tackle would veer off at 45 per cent at the vital moment, and all was lost. But after a few days of the treatment, Boris was back to his randy old self."

Dave was so impressed with what it did for Boris he is putting a small amount of the herbal remedy in a range of "Bang Bang" (sic) sausages for humans he sells from his farm shop. Unfortunately, the Sun neglected to give the address of the farm. But watch this page. We shall trace it -- even if we have to go to Kokokraba Market to look for it.

can omar bashir hold sudan together?

SUDAN

Cutting the Umbilical Cord
02/09/10, Cameron Duodu

Under the cosh: Sudanese President Omar al- Bashir. Can he hold Sudan together?

As Southern Sudan prepares for a referendum on its status in the larger Sudan, Cameron Duodu, leading African journalist and a pan-Africanist asks: Will President Omar al-Bashir really allow Southern Sudan to go?

The 14th Summit of the African Union held in Addis Ababa from January 31 to February 2, 2010, was noteworthy not for what took place formally at the meeting but what happened outside it. A diplomatic wrangle occurred over Sudan that can be compared to the west African dance of kpanlogo.

This is an impish hi-life dance in which the partners waggle against each other, upwards and downwards, whilst simultaneously wiggling forwards and backwards, as partners and onlookers shout"Kpanlogo!" at each stage.

The Addis Ababa "shuffle" went like this: the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, told the Summit: (STEP ONE, BODY UPRIGHT) "In Sudan, time is of the essence. The elections are three months away. The two referenda to determine the future shape of Sudan are in just under a year.

"At the same time, millions continue to be displaced in Darfur. Earlier this morning I attended a mini-Summit on the future of Sudan organized by the African Union Chairperson... I was pleased that African leaders supported the United Nations efforts to pursue a four-track strategy ...namely to forge consensus among member states on the way forward;...continue to strengthen the UN presence on the ground;...promote discussions on key post-referendum issues and...build the capacity of South Sudanese institutions. At the same time, we must continue work to deepen the encouraging improvement in relations between Chad and Sudan."

Although the Sudan versus Southern Sudan conflict is fraught with difficulties of perception, none of the protagonists could reasonably object to anything that Ban Ki-Moon told the Summit. Outside the Summit, however, he gave an interview to two French journalists, which seemed to freeze him in one of the positions of kpanlogo (to the consternation of the spectators at what might be called the "Summit Ball"!)

STEP TWO: (BODY BENT DOWNWARDS, AS WRIGGLING CONTINUES) Or how a translation error led to an international incident.

"On Saturday morning, Ban Ki-moon appeared to be breaking with five years of standing U.N. policy toward Sudan, by telling two French news agencies that he would try to prevent Africa's largest country Sudan from splitting into two nations in the 2011 referendum on independence for Southern Sudan." "We'll work hard to avoid a possible secession," the wire service Agence France Presse (AFP) reported him as saying."

Ban's remarks ... set off a major international incident in Sudan, prompting Sudan's Southern leaders to accuse the Secretary-General of interfering in the South's decision to determine its own political future. Southern Sudan's president, Salva Kiir Mayardit, wrote to Ban, saying his remarks constituted "an erroneous description of the U.N.'s role as a guarantor" of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended the Sudanese civil war and gave southerners the right to vote on independence in January 2011.

Ban was quoted by the French reporters as saying that he favours a unified Sudan, adding, "We will try to work hard to make this unity attractive." But AFP had apparently mistranslated the English language interview (Kpanlogo!) in its first French version of the story(Kpanlogo!), and then repeated the mistake when the French was re-translated into English.(Kpanlogo!)

The actual quote by AFP said: "Then we will work very closely -- we will have to work very closely -- not to have any negative consequences coming from this potential or possible secession."

The story first appeared on the wires in French in the morning and in English in the early afternoon. It played out over three days in the international press, getting picked up by news agencies, the BBC and the Financial Times, causing consternation. (Kpanlogo!)

Photo:

Refugees wait for the distribution of food and non- food items in Akobo town, Southern Sudan

The slow-grinding machinery of the U.N. only issued its first public denial three days later. It read: "In order to clarify erroneous reports about remarks attributed to the Secretary-General concerning Sudan, the Secretary-General's spokesperson would like to reaffirm the Secretary-General's position, which is that the United Nations would work to support the parties in their efforts to "make unity attractive", as well as the exercise by the people of Southern Sudan of their right to self-determination in a referendum.

"Any suggestion that the United Nations may have taken a position that may prejudge the outcome of such a referendum is incorrect."(Kpanlogo! Alogo Aloogo, Kpanlogo!

Whew! The brouhaha points to the hidden landmines that still lie in Sudan's path to real peace. Next year's referendum will, of course, be held under "international supervision". But are there any guarantees that there won't be hanky-panky? Did Ban Ki-Moon let slip a potential UN sleight-of-hand, when he spoke to the French journalists? Why did it take three days to correct the "mistranslation" if it was indeed a "mistranslation"?

The people of Southern Sudan cannot be blamed if they ask such questions. I mean, even in a country under the international spotlight as Afghanistan, an election was held in which most of the opponents of the eventual "winner", President Hamid Karzai, accused him of massive election rigging. They also charged the international community -- including the United States and its ally, Great Britain, the loudest advocates of democracy throughout the world -- of condoning Karzai's fraud.

Can the frail, infant regime of Southern Sudanese resist any electoral crimes that are deployed through a hidden international agenda to influence the outcome of the 2011 referendum? The answer is disquieting, when one remembers what took place in Afghanistan, and before that, the electoral frauds in Kenya and Zimbabwe and the annulment of the Nigerian election of June 12, 1993.

Meanwhile, another grenade has been lobbed into the road-map of the Sudanese peace process. The International Criminal Court has been told, by its own appeals panel, to add the crime of genocide to the charge sheet against President Omar al-Bashir. President Bashir already faces an arrest warrant on seven charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The appeal panel's decision means that the prospects are now closer for adding thegenocide charge. The appeal was against an earlier ruling by the ICC, which said there was "insufficient proof" that Bashir had intentionally participated in genocide.

If a genocide charge is preferred against Bashir, it will be the first by the ICC against a serving head of state. (Slobodan Milosevic, the late Yugoslav leader, faced genocide charges but only after he had stepped down. He died in jail whilst being tried.)

Bashir rejects the charges against him, and his Government in Khartoum is claiming that the ICC has deliberately announced the genocide charge now to "obstruct" the elections to be held in Sudan in two months time. April. A Sudanese Information Ministry official, Rabie Abdelatif, said: "This procedure of the ICC is only to stop the efforts of the Sudanese government towards elections and a peaceful exchange of power.

We are not bothering actually what the ICC will say, whether it includes genocide or not."

But a spokesman for one of Darfur's most powerful rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement (Jem), welcomed the ruling. "This is a correct decision," Ahmed Tugud told Reuters. "We believe that what we have seen on the ground in Darfur amounts to a crime of genocide. Now we are assessing our situation on whether it is ethically possible to negotiate with a government accused of committing genocidal crimes against our people."

But is the ICC decision of any real import? President Bashir has indeed avoided arrest since the ICC issued a warrant against him, because many African and Arab leaders have become wary of the people the ICC chooses to seek an indictment against. Since the warrant was issued Bashir has visited Qatar, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe among other nations.

More important, the African Union has been split in its support for the warrant. Although countries like Botswana have been very critical of Bashir, the AU's most senior diplomat, Jean Ping, for instance, has hit out at the ICC, accusing the court of only targeting African nations. "We are not for a justice with two speeds, a double standard justice - one for the poor, one for the rich," Ping said.

Although Ping did not name any countries or personalities, the illegal invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain, with the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths it has caused, could not have been too far from his mind. If George Bush, the former American President who launched the war against Iraq, and his principal ally, Tony Blair, are both walking free with no warrants issued against them, a problem of perception is caused in African and the Arab world for the ICC. Many Africans, remembering that the ICC has put ex-President Charles Taylor of Liberia behind bars, have begun to suspect that the ICC's Machiavellian approach is, "If you can catch them, then issue a warrant. But if their countries are too powerful, then don't try."

The ICC, in other words, is undoubtedly engaged in its own version of kpanlogo!

walking into history

A WALK INTO HISTORY (WITH EYES FIRMLY CLOSED)

By CAMERON DUODU

One of the weirdest radio programmes on the air at the moment is broadcast on Saturday mornings on the BBC’s Radio4 network (which is transmitted only to UK listeners but can be found on the internet at

www.bbc.com/radio4

The programme is called Saturday Live and it almost always manages to spring a surprise on its listeners. It rolls along like any other programme, then suddenly, wham! something comes along that makes your hair stand on end.

One item that caught my ear was a laconically-related account of the June 1967 war between the Israelis and the Arabs. A British architect described how he had gone to Damascus, Syria, to discuss a hospital building project, and had no sooner arrived than the war broke out.

Damascus was soon put into blackout mode and each evening, he and a colleague had to feel their way along the walls of Damascus, sometimes crawling on the pavements in the dark, trying to find a particular restaurant where they wanted to eat dinner! And they did the same thing on their way back to their hotel!

What? Put one‘s life in danger, for a bite? What about buying some loaves of bread and corned beef and consuming it in one‘s hotel room? Or wrapping up some food at lunchtime and eating it cold later? But what do I know?

Anyway, who am I to talk? Once, on a visit to Monrovia, Liberia, I was extremely pleased to find a restaurant where they cooked the famous Ghanaian dish, fufuo, together with smoked bush meat such as antelope, and if my memory serves me right, even the topmost Ghanaian delicacy of all -- grass-cutter. Their name for fufuo was domboi.

The soups -- pepper soup or light soup, as well as palm soup (locally called palm-butter soup) and groundnut soup (ground-pea soup) were just as delicious as at home. So every single day, I sent my “chamber-maid”, a very nice young man called Mr Doe, to go with a taxi and buy lunch for me, while I stayed in my room and worked on the stories that I had been sent to Liberia to write. In those days, Liberia was a mini-United States, in terms of what its shops had to offer, and I could not believe it when I heard, a few years later, that the civil war into which it had descended, had made life unbearable for everyone.

However, my biggest coup, in terms of looking for familiar food in far-away places, occurred in Geneva, Switzerland. Cooped up for weeks covering the interminable Zimbabwe independence talks in 1976, I soon got bored with Swiss food (and became home-sick as a result) until a friend of mine from my Ghana Broadcasting days, the former news reader, James Okyne, now a diplomat based in Geneva, took me to one particular restaurant. He pointed to a dish called busecca and asked me to order it. Jimmy is a mischievous fellow and I could see from the twinkle in his eyes that some fun was on the way.

Was it going to be a large-eyed toad or what?

I waited anxiously for the dish to arrive, and it soon came. As soon as I saw it, I burst out laughing like a maniac, and James, who had an equally loud laugh, joined me. Fortunately there weren’t too many diners around, and so our embarrassment wasn’t too pronounced. The dish was -- nicely-cooked, soft tripe in a delicious soup.

Now, tripe isn’t everyone’s dish of the day, I know: the Scots have a version of it called haggis and the English people never stop laughing at them for eating it. Well, in Ghana, we love it very much. As kids, we were always given the entrails of the animals our elders caught in traps or slaughtered, to go and clean it outside the house (for obvious reasons) before the cleaned version was cut up and used to cook marvellous soup for us.

But, we weren’t satisfied with what our mother would dish out for us, and would often hide some of it on the sly, and steal back into the bush later to light a fire there, cook it and consume it. The clandestine nature of this enterprise added enormously to the enjoyment we derived from the soups -- despite the fact that we normally didn’t have any ingredients to put in the soup, other than salt and pepper. We would return home after consuming the stuff, wearing innocent faces but pleased as punch with ourselves.

Such childhood ‘japes’ had created a huge appetite in me for tripe, and I often braved the stench and went to the slaughter-house near the beach, at Korle Gonno in Accra, to buy the entrails of freshly-killed goats. And now, here, in sterilised Geneva, was a plate of tripe for me. It was excellent to the taste, too.

James explained that the restaurant mainly served Italian dishes and that busecca had its origins from the Milan region of Italy. Needless to say, that restaurant became my home away from home, in Geneva. As soon as the waiters saw my face, they went to the kitchen and ordered busecca -- before they came back to ask me what I wanted to go with it. I usually had rice or potatoes or both.

These days, worries about cholesterol have limited my quest for tasty food -- well, food tasty to me. But when I first came to live in London, I sought and obtained almost everything I used to eat in Ghana -- from Brixton market, Tooting market and Peckham market. North London and East London are also full of shops that cater for those in search of West African delicacies.

But back to Saturday Live. Another contributor to the programme I am talking about related the story of how she went out of her office in Saville Row, London, one lunchtime, to buy sandwiches for her workmates. Outside, she heard loud music coming from the rooftop of a nearby building!

The edifice housed “Apple Records,” the business offices of the Beatles. The Beatles were recording an album live, up there on the roof. Naturally, the street filled up with delighted spectators.

Two policemen who got to the scene, as the crowd thickened and blocked the road, also came on to the programme to relate how they went up to the roof to look for the person in charge, and were directed to the road manager of the Beatles. He told them “the boys” had been recording an album and would finish soon. He said they only had one more track to do, Get Back (sic).

Soon, the Beatles finished it and descended down. Another track they had recorded that day up on the rooftop was Don’t Let Me Down. Imagine just going out to buy sandwiches at lunchtime and hearing a hit number like that beaming down towards you, played live from the rooftop above you, by --The Beatles! It made me remember Accra’s “afternoon jumps, where C K Mann, the Ramblers and others first played many of the songs that turned into bestselling Cds.

I was pondering over coincidences when the thought struck me: “Wait a minute! You’ve walked into a few coincidences of your own, haven’t you?”

Yes -- indeed I have. The first occurred in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1958. It was during my first trip outside Ghana and it happened as I was on my way to Moscow, from where I was to fly to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to attend an Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference. I left Accra by Air Liban, and we were to spend a night in Beirut and fly on to Cairo the next day, en route to Moscow.

The Middle East, as ever, was in turmoil. There had been a coup in Iraq, which had sent ripples throughout the region, and afraid that there would be an insurrection in the Lebanon too, President Camille Chamoun asked the United States for assistance. President Eisenhower sent in the US Marines. Well, nothing changes, does it?

Now, there were groups of fighters in the Lebanon who didn’t like the idea of an American invasion one bit (who does?), and snipers hid in every nook and corner, taking pot shots at vehicles that they thought were transporting “Yanks”. But Air Liban’s officials ignored this and drove us by bus to a hotel right in the centre of Beirut. “They are all Lebanese patriots and won’t shoot at an Air Liban bus”, they said confidently. What about the crossfire? It appeared as if that hadn’t entered their heads. I knew about such things, and I was as scared as hell.

It was of the worst nights I had ever spent anywhere on earth. Throughout the night, we heard the sound of gunfire. I had never heard military weapons fired in anger before. All the gunfire I’d ever heard was the relatively quiet discharge of hunting guns. The rapid machine-gun fire, kah-kah-kah-kah, frightened the daylights out of me, as did the loud bang of what I thought were rifles but could have been bazookas.

Worse, I was put in a room together with a Palestinian, who began to make repugnant advances to me! He only stopped his nonsense when I threatened to go and ask the hotel manager to give me a different room. When we embarked the next day for Cairo, I was as happy as a lark.

In Cairo too, I had a coincidence of sorts. After resting for a bit, I put on my kente and took a stroll towards a park near my hotel. People came to me from everywhere to feel the texture of the kente and express their admiration. I didn’t, of course, understand a word of Arabic, except that I heard one particular word, qwe--iis, [okay] so often that it stuck in my mind. At the park, a beautiful Arab girl stayed by me and began to teach me Arabic. I was enchanted by her because she wore a revealing blouse and you know…!

I still remember some of the words she taught me: izzayak (the popular version of “how are you doing?” and the formal version, “kif haluka”, as well as the reply to them -- qwe--iis and Al’ham D’ulilah -- to this day. If I’d had more time in Cairo, I assure you I would have had myself an Egyptian bride, and all thanks to kente. And at that time, the beautiful special kente called Fathia fata Nkrumah had not even been invented. Or had it?

After my ‘romantic’ outing, I returned to my hotel to find that -- I couldn’t gain entrance to it! The place had been blocked off by the police, and was filled with reporters and political activists. They were witnessing the installation of Mr Ferhat Abbas as Prime Minister of the Algerian Provisional Government in exile. It was only my kente that gained me entrance to the hotel. Kente-clad as I was, I was immediately whisked off to Ferhat Abass and asked to congratulate him, as the camera bulbs popped.

On the plane to Moscow from Cairo, we stopped in Rome for a while, and I saw in the airport newsagents, British newspapers with headlines announcing that the Russian writer, Boris Pasternak, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I, of course, knew nothing about the trouble Pasternak was having with the publication, in the West, of his novel, Dr Zhivago, and I must have annoyed my hosts of the Soviet Writers’ Union a great deal by pestering them to arrange an interview with Pasternak for me! I wanted to be the first person outside Russia to interview Boris Pasternak -- you know? Man, what is a journalist without fame?

Ha, my Russian hosts always said politely, “Ok, we have passed on your request.” My guide, a nice, young writer on Izvestia called Oleg Vasiliev, bore the brunt of my prodding, and if he did pass my requests on, he must have annoyed the big guns at the Soviet Writers’ Union a great deal.

Of course, the interview, predictably, never happened. In fact, Pasternak had probably been arrested even as I was requesting to be taken to him; he was imprisoned for a long time and made to denounce the Nobel Prize as a propaganda gambit against the USSR. He died a broken man several years after the publication of Dr Zhivago.

One day, the Russians said they were taking us to a reception in the Kremlin. For a young journalist who had heard so much about the Kremlin from news reports, this was most exciting. So out came my kente, though the temperature and the wind felt like it was below freezing point. I wore a pullover beneath the cloth and also wrapped a scarf tightly around my neck.

We were in the Kremlin reception hall sipping our drinks when the whole place fell silent all of a sudden. Everyone then broke into applause. The Soviet leader, Mr Nikita Khrushchev, had made his entrance. At that time, “Mr K”, as he was known to the world press, was perhaps the most famous man in the world, following his denunciation of Josef Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, and his ruthless crushing of the Hungarian revolt against communism in 1956.

You could hardly tune in to a foreign news broadcast in those days without hearing the name of Khrushchev. In 1956, he and his Number Two, Nikolai Bulganin, had visited Britain on a visit marked by sensation, following the death of a British secret agent, a frogman called Commander Lionel Crabb (also known as ‘Buster Crabb’) who dived beneath the ship that brought the two Russian leaders to Britain, He was presumably sent by British intelligence to study the ship’s build and armoury, and paid for it with his life.

As I made my way towards the circle Mr K was in, someone, I presumed a KGB man, kindly propelled me forward towards Mr K. I noticed that this was being done quietly to other African delegates as well, and very soon, Mr K was surrounded almost entirely by a group of African delegates, including the Senegalese writer and film-maker, Sembene Ousman, two Angolan writers, Mario de Andrade and Viriato da Cruz, and a black Brazilian artist called Tiberio Wilson. I bent down to admire the Order of Lenin on Mr K’s chest as a photograph was taken. The picture made it to the back page of the London Times and when I returned to Ghana, the Director of Ghana Information Services, the late Jimmy Moxon, generously gave me a copy of the paper. Fame had begun to pursue me.

Mr K told us that he could see in us, the vitality and youthfulness of Africa, and that he was sure Africa would rise up to play an important role in world affairs. Like every opportunistic journalist, I took the opportunity to quiz Mr K. Translated by a formidable little woman called Oksana Krugerskaya, who impressed me a great deal by using Krushchev’s first name, “Nikita”, to address him, I asked the Soviet leader whether there would ever be disarmament in the world?

“Nyet!” said Mr K. “The Western capitalist world is too envious of the resources of the USSR to allow us to live in peace. They will always try to capture our resources for themselves and that is why we must be strong enough to defend ourselves.”

I was chilled to the bone by that answer. So the Cold War would last my lifetime? It was a terrible thing to tell an idealistic young man, but Mr K, as everyone knew, was a blunt man who called it like it was. At that time, Russia was a closed country to Ghana, which had only gained its independence the year before, and my report to Radio Ghana of my interview with Mr Khrushchev caused a minor sensation -- behind my back.

From Russia, I was invited to China by the Chinese delegate to the Tashkent conference, a poet by the name of Yang-Shuo. I spent three weeks in China, having an idyllic time. One day, I attended a banquet at which about a score of different, extremely delicious dishes, were served. Twenty dishes! I ask you!

On another day, while we were strolling in a park at Wuhan, a city on the Yangtse river, we were suddenly surrounded by a group of Young Pioneers, red scarves gleaming around their necks, who sang to us with the most angelic voices, a beautiful song which so moved me that I can still sing it (after a fashion!) It was called yeesuchii-hao or something that sounded like that. I was told by our interpreter that it meant “socialism is good”.

In Beijing, I met the Chinese Premier, Mr Chou en-Lai, in the company of a few other African writers. Again, I took advantage of my profession to quiz him, while my companions looked on shyly. Did China regret being isolated from the world, having lost its seat at the United Nations to Taiwan as it had?

Mr Chou-en-Lai said: “In China, we don’t think in terms of today or tomorrow or even decades. We think in terms of thousands of years.” In other words, China’s isolated position would not be permanent. He went on to say something that at the time, I considered bizarre to the point of being almost barmy: “China is the only country in the world that can survive a nuclear war,” he said. “We have (then) a population of 650 million. Even if we lose half of that in a nuclear war, there would be over 300 million people left. They would all be required to plant trees. And in a thousand years, China would be a country with high agricultural production, which would be exported to the other countries where the populations have survived.”

Again, I was chilled to the bone. These Cold War leaders, I realised, had been hardened beyond measure by the hostility of the West towards their communist way of life.

Incidentally, it was the far-seeing nature of Chou-en-Lai that enabled him to swallow his pride and invite Henry Kissinger secretly to go to Peking for talks, following which President Richard Nixon himself made his famous trip to China in 1972. Those two trips changed the world’s geopolitical situation, and paved the way for the full re-entry of China into the comity of nations. And, as we can see today, China’s patient diplomacy and willingness to change, has, after the mad years of the “Cultural Revolution”, yielded results no-one could have foreseen. The China of today, is a major, if not the major, economic player in the world. It waited until it could get Hong-Kong back -- without war. Taiwan could well be next. No-one now laughs when the Chinese slogan of the late 1950’s: “The US imperialists and their running dogs are paper tigers” is recalled.

But a sad fact often ruins my recollections of my visit to China: my friend, the poet Yang-Shuo, is reported to have committed suicide during the terrible years of the Cultural Revolution (of 1966-78). If that is true, it is a terrible tragedy, for Mr Yang-Shuo spent his life making friends for China, having, for many years, been the Chinese representative on the Afro-Asian People‘s Solidarity Organisation in Cairo.

It was this organisation that organised the writers’ conference in Tashkent which I attended as one of Ghana’s delegates. (The others were Mrs Efua Sutherland, Miss Cecile McHardy and Mr John Elliott (who was later to become Ghana’s first Ambassador to the USSR.) Without the friendliness shown to me by Mr Yang-Shuo, I would never have gone to China. If they disgraced him during the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese owe him total rehabilitation -- in my view.

How Economics Is Changing Ghana For The Worse

I was staying at a bungalow between Bunso and Atukrom in the Eastern Region at one time when, in the morning, I decided to take a walk to meet my chauffeur, who would be arriving from Asiakwa, nearby. I walked and walked.

No driver.

But I didn't mind. Not only was the walk good for my health (I rationalised) but also, it gave me a chance to reacquaint myself with the vegetation -- what was left of it. For this area, which used to be thick forest, has been denuded of most of its hard woods, by chain-saw operators. They carry out illegal logging close to dwelling places all over Akyem Abuakwa and other parts of the Eastern Region, working on Sunday mornings, when the people leave the l woods to what is left of the animals and the birds. For the animals the people used to trap or hunt for food -- grass-cutters, bush rats, antelopes, bucks, monkeys and squirrels -- have all been driven away farther afield by the noise of the chain-saws and the destruction of their habitat.

The corrupt police let the loggers pass with their lorryloads of wood, on the way to Accra -- for a consideration. It is the singe most wanton act of eco-vandalism you can think of. And it is done under the noses of the law-enforcement agencies. Carry one bag of wee (Indian hemp or ganja) and they will grab you and take you to court, where you may face a minimum sentence of ten years imprisonment. But destroy the habitat to be inherited by our children and grand-children, ad you will go free after paying a bribe of a few cedis.

By the roadside, as I walked, my eye was caught by a plant that was bearing some nice, juicy-looking, very red (ripe) berry-sized type of fruit that transported me into early childhood ecstasy. It was a fruit called asoa. I picked up a couple of fruits, peeled them and put them in my mouth. It tasted as sweet as I expected.

But the real miracle of asoa is not that it tastes sweet -- ij fact its sweetness is quite subdued. It is what it does to other fruits that one eats which is the marvel. It can make literally everything taste sweet -- I mean really sweet. This includes unripe oranges and lemons! And -- three-day-old, foul-smelling palm wine!

As I walked along, meditating on why we haven't put asoa into industrial production to replace sugar, which everyone knows can causes diabetes, I soon came to a junction where -- as if by my command -- oranges. maize and other things were being sold.

The impulse to put the asoa I had eaten to the test was so strong that althogh I wasn't carrying money, I went to the orange seller and asked her whether she would sell me some. I warned her, "I am not carrying any money."

Te woman looked me and down. I was just dressed in jeans and T-shirt. There was no sign of money about me whatsoever.

But she gave me four nice oranges, and peeled them expertly for me, cutting a hole at the top for me to suck the juice from. I thanked her and continued my walk.

The oranges, need I say, had a heavenly deliciousness. I'd hardly finished eating them when my car showed up. We went back to the bungalow and I picked up some money. Then I came and paid the woman and gave her a huge tip We got talking. It turned out that she knew two of my uncles -- Wofa Kwadwo 'Ade and Wofa Kwadwo Kuma -- who reside in her nearby village, Nsutem, and I asked her to convey a message to them that I would be coming to see them the next day.

When I remember that day -- the unexpected delicacy and even more important, the amazing trust the woman reposed in my impecunious self -- my stomach develops cramps. Are such things still possible in our miney-crazy world?

It made me feel good. This was home -- as it should be.

One day, I was staying at a bungalow between Bunso and Atuukrom in the Eastern Region. In the morning, I decided to take a walk to meet my chauffeur, who would be arriving fro a nearby town. I walked and walked. No driver. Then I saw by the roadside, some nice, juicy-looking, very red (ripe) berry-type fruits that transported me into early childhood. It was a fruit called asoa. I picked up a couple of fruits and put them in my mouth.

Now the miracle about asoa is that it can make everything taste sweet -- I mean really sweet. This includes unripe oranges and lemons!

As I walked along, I soon came to a junction where oranges and other things were being sold.

The impulse to put the asoa I had eaten to good use was so strong that I went to the orange seller and asked her whether she would sell me some. I warned her, "I am not carrying any money."

I was dressed in jeans and T-shirt. There was no sign of wealth about me.

But the woman gave me four or so oranges, and cut them expertly for me. I thanked her and left.

The oranges, need I say, had a heavenly deliciousness. I'd hardly finished eating them when my car showed up. We went back to the bungalow and i picked up soe money. Then I came and paid the woman and gave her a huge tip We got talking. It turned out she knew two my uncles who reside in her village and I asked her to convey a message to them that I would be coming to see them the next day. When I remember that day, my stomach develops cramps. Who told me to ever leave?

I felt good. This was home -- as it should be. So how come

Ghanaians in the Diaspora call their homeland “Ogyakrom", which literally means "Place Of Fire".

The reason why Diasporans call their country "Ogyakrom" is that when they visit there from Europe or America, money "melts" in their pockets at such a fast rate that theirs pockets become like a crucible in which the temperature is somewhat nigh to what is to be found in Hades itself.

For once it is known in one's village that a "Diasporan" is in town, all one's relatives -- both close and newly close -- (we call the latter members of our "vulture family" because they are many, and they only gather around one when one has something that can be devoured)

come to him to narrate their tales of woe. The only way to shut them up is to "melt" some more cedis and shower it on them.

On one trip, I had almost reached my car from my room, en route to Accra, when a woman I hardly knew approached me, leading a child. "Blaa," (Brother) she said, "your niece fell into some hot water and was burnt badly. I need money to take her to hospital." And before I could say anything, she'd taken the little girl's cloth off, displaying terrible scabs all over her stomach.

I was extremely upset. I don't have a stomach for unsightly things. So, to me, this was callous emotional blackmail.

I had given no indication whatsoever that I would not accede to her request. So why did she have to show me the kid's scabs to seal the deal, as it were?

At such moments, one cannot help feeling that one is looked upon as a source of loot, not as a human being with sensitivities of one's own.

But this sort of thing is child's play, compared to the way some other guys go about extorting money from others in Ogyakrom. When a friend's mother died and they went to Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra to collect the body for burial, his sister was moping about in distress outside the mortuary, wondering why it was taking such a long time for the body to be released by the mortuary attendants, when one of them beckoned to her to come.

"Madam, are you related to the lady who has passed away?", he asked her in a conspiratorial whisper.

"Yes, I am her daughter."

"Oh, I am so sorry for you, Madam."

"Thanks for your sympathy.... Could you please hurry it up? We have very far to go."

"Do you know something, madam? We are the people who do all the dirty work for you people oh! But you people pay big, big money to the hospital but we who dey do all de work, dem dey pay us only small," he said. "If we tell you how much dem dey pay us, Madam, you go cry! So, we be hungry, Madam. ... Madam, do something!"

Before the lady could react, the mortuary attendant had npushed her into the mortuary. There, on a table, lay her mother's body, cut open.

The lady screamed and ran out. The people with her caught hold of her and tried to calm her down. They saw she was totally traumatised. When she told them what had happened, someone said: "Hmm, as for these mortuary people, that's what they do here oh!” They went and “dashed” the mortuary people some money and gave them a bottle of vodka. Within minutes, they had their perfectly dressed body to take away for burial.

"What annoys me is that I would have paid them the money anyhow, without being subjected to seeing my mother in that state," the lady said. "As the case was, I could have died of a heart attack myself, from the shock. I mean I nearly fainted! Imagine seeing your own mother cut open like that!"

"Ah," her companions said, "as for you you don't know them. They don't want to give you a chance to be able to say "No, I didn't bring money", or "I've paid all the money I brought into the hospital accounts. They want to hoist you at the end of a fait accompli. That's how they get you!"

"It's straightforward emotional blackmail!"

Of course it is. An oh, they do care so much about the way they do it, don't they?"

When my mother was still alive, I used to send her from London money whenever anyone I knew came there. One day, a "by-force" uncle; that is, one who was not really an uncle but represented himself as such, phoned to say that another distant uncle was in town and "we" should go and see him together. Of course, as someone with a car, my "uncles" simply multiply.

I had great difficulty finding the place in Croydon, but eventually, we got there. It turned out this guy was a true uncle/ I remembered that in my childhood, he used to visit us, as he and my mother shared the same step-father and grew up together. So I had no hesitation in giving him what, to me, was quite a large sum, to go and give to his “sister“, my mother.

I learnt later that he had used the money to buy himself a uniform for an Oddfellows Lodge of which he was a member! Meanwhile, there I sat smugly in London, thinking I'd made my mother financially ok for some time. In fact, to my chagrin, she had sent me messages asking for money. But I'd ignored them, thinking, "What's coming over my old lady? It's not three months since I sent her money through her brother and she's asking for more?" I didn't know that my "uncle" the Oddfellows champion had not given her a penny of what I'd sent her. All that travelling into the nooks and corners of Croydon at night, when I hate to drive, Al for nothing. And it had left my mother close to the point of need. How could anyone do such a thing? But that's the Ghana of today. I could see this idiot on a Saturday night clad in his Oddfellows finery from London. And my mother starving. None of the ideals of being an Oddfellow mattered to him. It hurt me --it hurt me badly.

When my mother passed and this guy came to the funeral and came to shake hands with me, I was sorely tempted to snub him by refusing his outstretched hand, or even to denounce him publicly. But I had the cowardice of the well-brought-up kid. It wasn't something my mother would have approved of, I thought. She was so sweet and would have hated to see me make a scene -- especially when the butt of my anger was her own step-brother..

But this was one day when I secretly wished I was one of those rough-hewn coves who got extremely pissed when someone they loved died, for had I been stoned out of my head, I would have been able to tell the crowd, in a loud voice, that this bespectacled windbag with a bald pate, the so-called timber merchant of means, had stolen money meant for the upkeep of his own "sister”, in order to buy a Lodge uniform to bask in in front of his peers! Superficial fool.

I really should have accosted him, for (if I may adapt Shakespeare)

"Thus good breeding doth make cowards of us all!"

Compare his action to that of the the woman who gave me some oranges, without knowing whether she could expect ever to set eyes on me again. Hmm, maybe the

greedy and the selfish among our countrymen are there to drive the home point to us that if you ruin your economy, you stand the risk of changing the very nature of your people too.