Features
“I-DON’T CARE-ISM” IS WHAT WILL DESTROY DEAR GHANA! By CAMERON DUODU
“I don’t-care-ism”?
I bet you’ve probably never hear d the word before in your life?
Well, when I was attending a Presbyterian Primary School in the 1940s, we were constantly warned against what the teachers called “I-don’t-care-ism!”
If you went to school in the morning without combing your hair, you had done so because you had cultivated the habit of “I-don’t-care-ism”!
If you left your homework undone, you were showing “I-don’t-carism”!
If you continually came to school late; if you left your reading books or exercise books behind; if you chatted while the teacher was outside the classroom [and a prefect wrote your name down as a “talkative!”]; if your uniform looked as if it had been slept in – “I-don’t-care-ism” was to blame!
At the time, I thought the teachers were too strict and I resented their inability to appreciate that one might have committed an offence not because one was addicted to “I-don’t-care-ism” but because of particular circumstances over which one might not have had any control. But as they say in Twi, “wobenyinabƐto!” [you will grow up to come and meet it!”]
In other words, it will happen to you, too. And then you will understand why it was condemned when YOU were committing it.
At maturity, you will discern that it was because of his or her indifference to your feelings that the person who had agreed to come and see you at 9 a.m., arrived at 10.30. Had he/she considered that you probably had woken up earlier than normal in order to get ready for the meeting? Had it been considered that you might have arranged another appointment to follow that one and that by turning up late, he?she would inevitably cause you to be late for the next one? To you, all that would indicate an “I-don’t-care-ish” attitude, wouldn’t it? And while trying not to be impolite, you’d be boiling inside, wouldn’t you?
You ask: why this psychological treatise on a quiet Tuesday morning, MR D?
Hmmm! Yes – a columnist must learn not to sound like a preacher but what is a man to do when a subject matter has been occupying his mind day and night?
The subject matter that is occupying my mind is –not hard to guess – COVID-19.
Now it may not be occupying as much space in your mind as mine, and I say good luck to you! For me, that a disease can suddenly descend on humankind and within four months or so, produce the following figures, is mind-blowing; beyond comprehension.
QUOTE :
WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard
Data last updated: 2020/5/18, 9:33am CEST
4,589,526Confirmed Cases
310,391Deaths
(Source: World Health Organization) UNQUOTE
Reader, had this disease occurred in Ghana in, say, the year of our independence (1957), when our population totalled 6,068,997, roughly two out of every three Ghanaians would have caught it! Just imagine that! And we aren’t finished yet with COVID-19 !
Shouldn’t a disease with a power of infection of this magnitude monopolise our thinking processes until by God’s grace, it vanishes from Planet Earth?
We in Ghana have been very fortunate so far, in that the disease appears mostly to have been brought
in aeroplanes to a single airport, Kotoka International. This means we were able to intercept the passengers carrying it, quarantine them and offer them treatment. Meanwhile, crack teams of contact tracers went to work, trying to find the people whom the passengers might have been in contact with, and testing them to see which of them had caught the disease, and who THEIR contacts were.
Meanwhile, we also took the precaution of “locking down” the country by asking workers to stay at home and banning social gatherings. All well and good, and when it looked as if our efforts were containing the rate of infections, we naturally relaxed things “a bit.”
But we then took our eyes off the ball. The figures of the infected became more and more indicative of the fact that the community at large had now begun to catch the disease. With our ability to test effectively challenged by a lack of adequate testing centres and our capacity to carry out “enhanced contact tracing” also limited by inadequate quantities of PPEs (personal protection equipment), we began to realise that we were sparring with a partner way above our weight.
And, of course, the bad news then hit us like a bomb. Our President, no less, told us in a national broadcast, that one person had infected 533 others at a “fish processing factory” at Tema.
What? One person infected 533? How could that happen?
We expected the Government to announce the immediate closure of the factory.
We expected the Government to name and shame the factory, pour encourager les autres (to teach others a lesson) as the French put it.)
But none of that happened. In Public Health practice, the most effective way of tackling a pandemic is to be absolutely open about it and use EVERY MEANS POSSIBLE to educate the community to follow best practice. Because it is the community that receives and imparts it. Simple.
However, the message conveyed by the failure of the health authorities to inform the populace of what had happened at Tema, was that, after all, they were not as serious about teaching us to avoid the disease as we had thought.
What’s the point of telling us to wash our hands, wear face masks and gloves and observe “social distancing”, if you allow a factory to spread the disease without imposing the severest penalties on it? And if you imply that you want to protect the factory by inexplicably withholding its name from the public?
Sadly, it wasn’t only the health authorities who failed us. Our media passed over the President’s explosive revelation about the Tema factory as if he’d just announced that Accra Hearts of Oak had drawn with Kumasi Kotoko again!Oh, another draw? Yawn! Yawn!
In every other country with a free press, the news would have been on the front pages of newspapers with banner headlines. But not in Ghana.
Fiery newspaper editorials? I am yet to see one.
Media panel discussions? Ho, why should this story that should remove Obinim from the story list?
I was so frustrated by how this story had been handled by the authorities and the media that, I issued a “press statement” urging the Government to set up a public enquiry to find out the facts about the issue.
No reaction from the Government!
Meanwhile, the Gold Mine at Obuasi is reported to have suffered a somewhat similar plight as the Tema factory.
Duh!??
I-dont’t-carism rules the day, right?
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
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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Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
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