THE earliest known regimented police force in Ghana comprised recruits who were certified illiterates. The British relied on their illiteracy for efficiency. They were called ‘bugabuga’ who took orders without question. Massa say make I bring you.

In those days, there were no short policemen. The ‘bugabuga’ were tall and straight as a pole. They were trained to look unfriendly. And when it came to slapping a recalcitrant for misbehaviour, a single slap was enough to deter other potential offender.

A policeman could single-handedly maintain order in the entire suburb of Bubuashie in Accra. He simply strolled around and his presence was felt in every home, every lane, every nook and cranny. His mere shadow was terrifying to behold.

A trouble maker was always mindful of the powerful delivery of the policeman’s slap at close range. Such a slap could cause a two-week nightmare plus or minus internal bleeding.

BLACK CAP

At that time, the policeman’s uniform was not black. It was brown! The black uniform is a latter-day idea, probably conceived when British suzerainty gave way to self-rule. The policeman was now attired in black outfit, black shoes and black cap, absorbing the heat from the sun.

The black-uniformed policeman looks dangerously hostile even if he is not. Black is for mourning, not keeping the peace. Black means something ominous. The top-ranking policemen managed to attire themselves in a gabardine-like material, looking more human.

Ghanaians have complained about the black uniforms for decades. They have seen British and American policemen on television in blue, smart-looking and professional in outlook, not black and miserably looking. So they complained but it fell on deaf ears.

This week, it was announced that black-uniformed cops will be a matter of the past. Ghanaian policemen will be differently attired, hurray! The cops will look like Yankee policemen and of course, walk like them. They will also be permitted to dance like them. This is not a presidential initiative.

It is my hope that with a change in uniform, there will also be a change in attitudes so that an entirely modern police force will be presented to Ghanaians.

Currently, there are a good number of policemen in the system doing some great job, catching the criminals and bringing them to book. The problem is that there is also a good number, negating the good reports of the dutiful and patriotic ones.

Gone are the days, though, when a policeman shot a warning-shot and the bullet ended in somebody’s nose. In those days, warning shots were aimed at the forehead so that if it missed, it could at least lodge in the nostrils. The idea was to disperse rioters. And how could that be done without bullets finding new homes in the ears and knee-caps of the rioters?

Today, there is a more professional police force. However, some of them have still not purged themselves of the ‘bugabuga’ ways. They still slap suspects, to teach them where power lies. This is not policing. It is an abuse of human rights.

What happens when a suspect is tortured and in the end he is found to be innocent? The police must be re-orientated to understand the importance of protecting rights instead of abusing them.

PROSTITUTES

And the police should stop swooping on people and parading them on television as prostitutes. Do they know what that means? It means, those swooped upon have been tried by the entire population of Ghana (via television) before they even appeared before the judge to be judged innocent or guilty. That is bad policing.

Should any of them be found innocent by the judge, how does she redeem her tarnished image? With certain sensitive cases, policemen should not be too over-zealous in parading suspects before the cameras. Redeeming one’s damaged image is a very difficult process no one should be saddled with.

Now, the most important role Ghanaians want the police to play is to provide personal security so that armed robbers will not continue to have a field day.

That calls into question whether or not the police patrols in the communities and on the highways are taking place. If robbers know that patrols are constantly being done, they’ll stop attacking people.

Even in the ‘bugabuga’ days, a single policeman’s stroll was effective enough to prevent crime. So jeep and car patrols should be the rule if truly we want to stem the tide of crime. In other words, the patrols will make it impossible for crime to flourish.

Finally, policemen should learn to be polite. They should be educated on this before handed their new uniforms. They should not talk like the ‘bugabuga’ people. They should learn consciously to use words like “please”, “kindly”, etc. For example, “Kindly let me see your driving licence.” Not, “Commot your driving licence come here right now.”

The newly-uniformed cops should have a civil tongue.

This article was first published on Saturday July 29, 2006

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Part III: The biological bottleneck and human serial processing

If computers must rely on time-sharing because their execution pipelines are fundamentally single-threaded, human beings face an even stricter biological wall.

The human prefrontal cortex-the central executive network responsible for conscious decision-making and focal attention-is strictly built for serial processing. We possess a single processing channel for conscious thought. We can no more focus on two complex cognitive problems simultaneously than a human tongue can articulate two different words at the same millisecond.

What people call multitasking is actually high-speed task-switching. When an individual attempts to write a report while fielding chat messages, the brain is not splitting its attention. Instead, it is performing a frantic neurological sleight-of-hand: actively shutting down the active parameters of one task, loading the context of another, executing a fraction of it, and reversing the process.

As Robert Grimmond-Thompson pointed out in his critiques of modern workflow models, this continuous oscillation carries a severe cognitive tax known as the switch cost effect. Every switch drains metabolic energy, leaves behind attention residue, and multiplies error rates. True simultaneous execution in humans only occurs when one or more activities are completely automated by subcortical motor loops, such as walking while breathing. The moment a second task demands conscious thought, parallel processing collapses.

Part IV: Reclaiming reality and discarding the myth

The persistence of the word multitasking keeps society trapped in an inefficient, exhausting loop. By pretending that humans can operate like idealised machines, workplaces foster chronic fatigue, shallow thinking, and degraded creative output.

The intervention led by researchers like Robert Grimmond-Thompson reminds us that we must discard the vocabulary of simultaneity. We do not multitask; we switch, we fragment, and we compromise our cognitive potential when we pretend otherwise. By honoring the immutable law of sequential execution across both silicon and synapses, we can redesign our technologies, our workspaces, and our daily routines around the genuine contours of reality.

The word “multitasking” acts as a harmful instruction manual that tricks people into forcing their brains to do something biologically impossible, causing deep damage to our neural activity, our health, and our daily lives.

Damage to neural activity

When people try to multitask, they force their brains into a constant state of rapid switching. Instead of letting neurons fire smoothly along a clear, focused path, the brain experiences a neural traffic jam.

Fragmented pathways: Every time you jump from a work task to a text message, your brain has to shut down one set of rules and boot up another. This breaks the natural rhythm of electrical signals.

Weaker connections: Because the brain is never allowed to stay on one deep task long enough to finish a clean thought cycle, it struggles to build strong, lasting neural connections for learning and memory.

Health hazards and physical stress

Treating “multitasking” as a normal way to live places a heavy toxic burden on the body and nervous system.

Constant panic mode: Every rapid mental switch triggers a mini-emergency in the brain, flooding the body with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.

Exhaustion and burnout: Living in this low-grade panic state keeps the nervous system overworked. It drains the prefrontal cortex of its energy glucose very early in the day, leading to crushing mental fatigue, high blood pressure, and chronic anxiety.

Damage to everyday operations

The daily fallout of the multitasking myth is a massive drop in human capability and quality of life.

Higher error rates: Because attention is chopped into tiny pieces, people miss important details and make careless mistakes.

Loss of deep thinking: Routine tasks take much longer to finish because of the constant interruptions and the lingering “mental crumbs” left behind from previous switches.

Shallow living: People lose the ability to sit down and solve complex problems or enjoy deep, meaningful focus, leaving the entire human race feeling constantly rushed, stressed, and unproductive despite working harder than eve