Features
The golden experience
When gold and diamonds were first discovered in South Africa, many men lost interest in sex. The discovery, therefore, caused marital problems the world over. Wives thought their dear husbands had gotten impotent and perhaps needed herbal treatment – AK 47 bitters. In fact, they were mistaken. Their husbands were only preoccupied with dreaming about gold and just couldn’t get it up to fulfill their marital obligations.
When the gold and diamond sensation got blown out of proportion, happily-married men either divorced their wives or simply left them and headed for South Africa to “do galamsey.” It was also a boom for some wives.
Hot-headed, sexy, firm buttocks, slim waisted, shinny-lipped wives left their husbands gaping in wonder as they floated to the Rand to hawk their beautiful bodies for gold money. Some became strip-teasers and belly dancers to entertain tired gold diggers and made a fortune therefrom. Gold had brought a good measure of madness to the world
The global insanity became so infectious that gainfully employed folks vacated post and were last seen in dirty garb with shovels and pans digging gold. Some pastors and catechists were even infected with the virus of the golden madness.
They promptly told the Holy Spirit to hold on “small”. They threw off the cassock, shoved the Holy Bible aside and travelled thousands of miles to dig diamonds. Man shall not subsist only on the word of God. Moreover, when man is bellyful his chances of making it to heaven are high. The reason is that the distance between a man’s stomach and the gates of heaven is automatically reduced once his belly is well-filled with good food and wine.
The gold rush also brought ready employment to armed robbers. They quickly procured arms and ammo and danced joyfully to the land of the Afrikaners, not to dig for gold, but to rob successful miners of their fortune. It brought about violence and a security problem. The miners were compelled to arm themselves and people died through violence while others were maimed.
The situation was characterised by mayhem and some returned home wealthy, others poorer than they had been. It was a whole confusion of comedy and tragedy, successes and failures, joy and sorrow. That is what gold begets.
Go to Obuasi and witness what gold can do to a human being. Illegal gold diggers are prepared to die in defence of their notoriety and determination to prosper from minerals that do not belong to them. They are armed to the teeth and would readily cause harm if antagonised.
Some have died while digging for gold or through mercury or cyanide poisoning. When workers of Ashanti Goldfields blast surface rock and wait for the dust to settle, these galamsey men rush in there to scoop out earth which they are not supposed to be doing because of the health risks and because it is unlawful.
Galamsey operators have clashed with police and security men of the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation (AGC) more than once this year alone. In a recent offense, the operators were alleged to have destroyed AGC property, torched housing facilities, and stole 58,000 birds from the corporation’s poultry unit, among other things.
Surely, the rogues are selling some of the birds cheaply under half the price, and the rest are certainly being organised into light soup to clear malaria. Of course, some of the meat would end up roasted, fried or toasted and eaten with ground pepper and akpeteshie if not Extra ‘Hewale.’
This is the comedy of the palaver. The looming tragedy is that the galamsey men are said to be getting ready to avenge the death of three of their colleagues who were killed in the confrontation. Apparently, they are not content with the chicken festival and want to cause havoc.
The problem with those who mine gold is that they are die-hards – Yente gyae! Most of them have seen the bitterness of life, have suffered hunger, disease and deprivation. They find galamsey as the golden way out. It is their saviour, their messiah. If they would meet death in the course of finding a means to survive, they would welcome it. And if they could be killed, then they must also kill. That sums up the mentality of these operators.
I have a feeling that it would be better for the authorities to deal prudently with the matter while beefing up security in the area. In the first place, to deprive them completely of their operations without offering them any alternatives would mean turning them loose to become armed robbers since they are armed, anyway. We have enough armed robbers in the system. We don’t want new entrants.
What should be done is that their activities should be regulated rather than obliterated. A way should be found to meet their representatives to iron out the growing differences. And the following must be considered.
That they cannot operate without licence; they should be confined to specific areas of operation so as to save the environment from degradation; should renounce violence and the celebration of chicken festivals; should regulate the activities of their members; should not encroach upon AGC property and desist from lawlessness of all kinds, especially stealing and be prepared to be tried and jailed if they breach the peace or the law.
The aim is not to encourage galamsey but to regulate it so that it becomes legal and employment generating without it become a nuisance to society.
As one AGC official told me recently, the activities of the galamsey operators do not adversely affect the corporation except when the operators become lawless, encroach and steal. That is where they become undesirable.
It is unfortunate that AGC does not arm their security men well enough to deal with lawless operators. Anyhow, we hope the situation would be well-thought-out so that calm can return to the Obuasi area.
Already, the prostitutes in the area are feeling uneasy. When there is a stir, business goes down. Theirs is a matter of the heart and of the thigh. That’s a cool matter and they are praying hard that the matter should be resolved at a high level. Because the higher you go, the cooler it becomes!
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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