There is a legend about what Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah wanted Tema to be like.

According to the prophets of the pre-coup era and those who claimed to have known the Osagyefo’s plans, Tema was being gradually developed to become a model city, a workers’ paradise, not a Chinatown.

Today if you see the Meridian Hotel, you’ll think it has just suffered from a bomb attack. Kokotako re­cently told me he was sure the once elegant hotel was suffering from a virus infection.

Tema, it has been said, was meant to be a thoroughly planned heaven­ly-city under a presidential blueprint to be eventually decorated with two border posts. You couldn’t enter using bush paths and grasscutter routes. No rat-catching gimmicks!

According to the sages of those times, non-residents of the city on a visit would have been required to go through a bureaucratic and medical procedure.

First you’ll have to produce your passport cum visa, or a travelling certificate, lassez de passe or carte identite (identity card). Your fore­head would have to be examined by an expert to make sure you are not a magician. No magical shows in the city. No Kofi Larteh!

You’ll also be required to produce a medical certificate to prove that you’ve been vaccinated against yellow fever, typhoid and poverty. You don’t come to the city to become a beggar. No way!

In a nutshell, the city was meant to become the model city of West Africa, the Vatican of Sikaman; a state within a state, a wonderland of no mean accolade.

The 1966 coup was a national tragedy although Ghanaians hailed the coup. To the Osagyefo, it was a personal tragedy. His dreams of a glo­rious harbour city, for instance, with its night-time glow and daytime glitter were washed away as the sub-machine guns rattled the signal of the advent of Ghana’s woes.

Nkrumah probably lamented the coup for one main reason that Tema would never be what he visualised it to become. Some people say the tears he shed were laden with an anathe­ma, a bit of which has probably been visited upon Tema.

Yes, visit Tema and you’ll see ves­tiges of the old plan, now adulterated and totally confused with gross lack of maintenance, irregular development, over-flowing manholes, dark streets at night, beggars, and people who would have been denied access to the comforts of the city, had the Osagyefo been alive.

Tema is no longer for workers. It is now a free-for all, a boiling pot of all ethnic groups like fufu-eating Ashantis, butter-smearing Fantes, akple-eating Ewes, kontomire-swal­lowing Akwapims, khebab-roasting northerners and Brong self-imposed exiles who would eat nothing apart from unripe plantain. Very delicious, you know.

The shoe-shine boys are in their hundreds and wayside chop bars es­pecially at night are common feature. You’ll be glad to meet an ex-seaman at a drinking bar talking about the good old days when Black Starline was indeed a national line. You’ll notice a retired seaman by his swag for the unmistakable seaman trademark in the gait.

Tema of today is famous for its brand of Pidgin English. It is next to the Nigerian version which is ac­knowledged by linguistic experts as the cremé of pidgin. Not good for SSS students, though.

The city is also famous for its high cost of living. Those who come from Accra and Kumasi to live there often pack bag and baggage after a few months and run away without anybody chasing them. Sometimes they leave their jackets behind. Life is no joke.

If you can, however, stay in Tema for over five years without suffering from financial constipation, then you are qualified and baptised to live in the ‘hard’ cities of the world including Hanoi, and Bombay. As for Mogadishu, I doubt it. Sometimes you have break­fast once in two weeks and that’s not a cheap situation. You’ve got to bow.

Surprisingly those who live in Tema and have got used to the rough weather don’t want to live anywhere else. They love the city, the breeze, the pidgin.

Today, the new SSNIT flats are giving the city a new class just as fast as the deteriorating conditions of the Tema Development Corporation (TDC)-owned houses are de-beauti­fying the city. No maintenance what­soever and the corporation is beset with problems and matters that need redress.

At this very moment, the Tema Tenants Association (TTA) and TDC are at each other’s throat, in a dangerous horseplay that can degenerate into something else. The corporation in­tends to sell its rented units, meaning that if you can’t buy the house you’re living in, then you’ve got to quit and probably go to your hometown for good.

So whether you are a rich business tycoon or a mandated church mouse, you have to, within three months from now, make ready over three million cedis for the place you are occupying.

There is, however, an alternative. Poor tenants who can’t afford the out­rageous prices will from October 1 pay 300 per cent on rent. A single room will now cost 7,000 cedis per month.

Members of the tenants’ associ­ation who are ready to take to the streets in protest have accused TDC of having woefully failed as a landlord because it has not maintained build­ings it is supposed to maintain.

Some of the buildings are in a real mess.

The association has called for a commission of enquiry to investigate the matter to ensure that propriety and neglect no longer become good bedfellows and also to enable the poor worker and his family to have a place to lay their heads without being intimidated with outright sales and high rents.

The Tema Development Corpora­tion (TDC) itself has a lot of things happening in there, the public would be very much interested in knowing. Many things in fact.

I’ll revisit the issue sooner than you’d expect. Watch out for the bombshell!

This article was published on

Saturday, August 6, 1994

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The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly good­ness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.

Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommoda­tion and a woman for the night.

Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.

You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.

If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.

He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being inter­viewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.

In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.

“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?

If Ghanaman, after several at­tempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.

When a Sikaman publisher land­ed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.

True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grab­bing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white mis­creant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…

The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally in­comparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness

When these same people come here we accept them even more hospi­tably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.

About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service

In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them any­where. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.

The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.

So after all, Sikaman has an Immi­gration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka Interna­tional. A pat on their shoulder.

I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.

Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.

“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refu­gee and Immigration Service Boards.

He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “

Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.

It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.

This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998

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