Features
The Water Palaver
When Ghanaman is relaxing at home and hears a knock at the door, he is likely to suspect that a Jehovah Witness man show him the best tax-free way to heaven. If it is not the Jehovah Witness man with the black bag, then it must be the landlord coming to talk nonsense.
“Yes, come in.” “You owe us ¢350,000 in water bills. We’re in to disconnect.”
“Wait a minute. Your presence is giving me heart attack, so come back later for payment.
Fact is I’m allergic to water bills.”
Some people don’t care a damn about electricity disconnection. No light, so what? What they are scared about is water cuts. They can cause instant diarrhoea. And soon, water and electricity costs are going to be increased, and an epidemic of diarrhea is highly expected.
It is, however, very difficult to disconnect some consumers because they make conscious efforts not to get cut off.
One favourite method is to train a dog which can detect a disconnector from a normal human being and do the chasing out accordingly. The dog must have appetite for human leg or human balls.
Another way is to allow yourself to be disconnected and then you can go to the water or electricity company, dressed in suit with a deep-frown on your face. That is where you can blow your horn.
“The interior minister is my brother-in-law. I command you by state power to reconnect me before I change gears. You don’t respect? If you don’t know me go and ask. Kofi Annan was my classmate. If you play, I’ll deal with you at the United Nations level.”
Sometimes, officials can take the bluff as very authentic and proceed to re-connect Kofi Annan’s classmate. But others will feel they are doing their job and the interior-minister’s in-law’s big mouth has nothing to with the execution of official assignments.
“Well, we know the Interior-Minister is related to you. But the bill must be settled anyway. If you can settle half, we’ll re-connect and give you time to settle the rest.”
It turns out that the man finally settles the bill, but doesn’t even know how Kofi Annan like.
As for his relationship with the interior Minister, it can only be at best, a dog’s imagination.
At any rate, Ghanaians are waiting for the new utility rates and are also hopeful that a corresponding raise in salary will be in place to absorb the shock.
Now Electricity Company and Ghana Water Company have many problems they would have to solve. One of them is waste. With electricity, illegal connections are very common and many are using power and paying nothing for it.
Others are using air-conditioners and pay nothing because they connect the wires in such a way that power used does not go through the meter and is, therefore, not recorded. What the company loses in a month countrywide is so huge that if it can be recovered, the company would be on rather good footing
The problem also is that, consumers who are disconnected have become wiser than the serpent. Some have taught themselves Basic Principles in Electricity. Many housewives know the principles better than any electrical engineer at ECG.
When you disconnected power to their homes, they simply wait for five minutes and reconnect. No sweat!
It is a simple procedure they have repeated so many times that they are no longer worried about and disconnection.
So bills pile up and ECG is helpless, and goes whining about the need to increase tariffs without really tackling the waste problem.
With water, it might be worse. People have illegal connections through which they sell water for their own pockets. Some pipes have burst for over six months and no one is bothered. People report leakages and no one is worried.
Ghana Water Company is not doing well because of waste. You can’t import expensive chemicals to purify water and let it go waster. No company can thrive on a system that is not bothered about waste.
So Ghana Water Company better wake up and save water. In some countries, water is imported. If we have it here, we should learn to conserve it.
Someone said, if we cannot plan for an occurrence as predictable as the annual rains, then what else can we plan for as a country? God has caused nature to schedule rains for specific periods or months within the year and everybody knows this.
One need not be a meteorologist to tell that the rains will fall in May and June every year. Any serious person who has something that the rains can affect, would therefore plan taking into consideration the likelihood of the rains falling. Therefore to find out that a whole country like ours, had not planned effectively, is mind-boggling.
The report by the World Bank that fiscal policy measures by the Finance Minister has led to no money being released for the World Bank sponsored project to deal with the perennial flooding situation in Accra, is so disappointing. The fact that this contributed immensely to the flooding in Accra, is an understatement.
There have been fires in our markets, but who is checking the wiring on a regular basis as a system designed to prevent future outbreaks? The occurrence of fires in our markets is something that must engage the attention of government and all the stakeholders.
The causes may be several but if a system of proper fire prevention is in place, l believe the number of occurrences will be drastically minimised. Electrical wiring for instance has been found to be one of the causes of market fires. Fire as we know from the experts, can only happen if these three things are present, namely source of heat, combustible material and oxygen i.e. air.
lf any one of these is missing, there will be no fire. It has been realised that heat generated in wires have caused fires in the past and therefore, an effective system must be put in place to ensure that, only certain approved qualified electricians, can execute wiring jobs in our markets instead of the current situation where different electricians execute wiring with different types of wires, of different quality, dimensions etc.
Preventive inspections schedule must also be put in place to endure compliance with uniform wiring standard, as well as adherence to expiry dates of the wires.
What baffles me is why some MCEs and DCEs are still at post while things are deteriorating in their areas of influence and yet the President or the Minister for Local Government seems to be unwilling to relieve them of their positions. People have lost their lives, official count is about 37 lives, properties worth millions of Ghana Cedis have been destroyed, people’s livelihoods have been destroyed and they are at ground zero.
We can go on and on and on about the devastating impact of the recent floods. Suddenly, we have these local authority heads, all over the place, demolishing buildings after the flood. Is this not insanity? Where were the LUPSA Engineers who issue permits at the local assemblies?
If they were doing their jobs, for which they are paid every month, they would have seen people constructing structures at Ramseyer sites. They would have seen people putting up structures very close to the bank of streams or rivers and could have enforced the regulations, which could have averted the level of impact on lives and property.
One particular issue which drives me crazy is the Kasoa to Mallam Junction stretch of the N1. The traffic jam between West Hills Mall and Weija Junction is due to the flooding of a place called Ataala. Anytime it rains heavily, the area floods and vehicles moving from West Hills towards Weija cannot use their normal lane but are forced to switch to the inner lane of those headed towards West Hills Mall from Weija and it did not start yesterday. I am so, so disappointed. God Bless.
By Laud Kissi-Mensah
The romance between man and wife ends where chopmoney palaver begins. When the man is leaving for work and the woman’s face looks like a rainy day, anyone can guess that the chop money delivered is quite below sea level.
But when she smiles too broadly for comfort and waves her husband goodbye zealously, it means the man did not only perform well under the cover of darkness but also dished out the correct amount of chop money.
The typical matrimonial home is a complex one. Many factors contribute to fuelling or preventing occasional civil wars. When Pyram became a household word, some husbands and wives put heads together, went borrowing, sold their belongings and invested in the sham scheme.
When Pyram collapsed, many marriages got shattered beyond repair. Wives blamed their husbands and husbands complained about nagging wives. In a few instances, punches were traded. Crises could not be managed as debts soared and creditors wanted back their money.
Chop money grew slim. Only Mr Kofi Annan could negotiate a truce between warring partners as daggers were drawn. The Pyram palaver brought more woes to Sikaman than the joy it was supposed to bring.
Many women have died from distress and frustration. All their resources which were joyfully invested in the scheme cannot be retrieved.
“Today, the Government says it cannot use taxpayers’ money to pay those who lost various sums of money to the two money-doubling banks Pyram and Resource 5000 Ltd. “We told you not to take your monies there and you didn’t listen. Paddle your own canoe, or canoe your own paddle,’ says the Sikaman government.”
The chop money palaver in Sikaman is getting heady. People are citing chop money problems for their offences. The newspapers report of a man who allegedly injected his three-week-old daughter with DDT because the wife was disturbing him with chop money matters too much. He is being tried by the courts.
Some women claim they abandoned their babies because their fathers refused to offer chop money. So when they dump the babies in the latrine, they are relieved of any burden. Looks like maternal instincts are withering out of mothers. These are indeed times when mothers no longer love their children because of chop money palaver.
Stomach capacity
The amount of chop money a father gives out each day, week or month depends on the family size and the stomach capacity of each family stomach. Members of some families are very light eaters and little is spent on food. But for other families where some members have ‘double chambers’ the food budget requires additional funds.
Indeed, in some families, members have natural appetite for food whether or not they take peters (bitters). And when food isn’t enough, there can be an uprising against constituted domestic authority, the family equivalent of the Guinea Bissau rebellion.
Yes, where one person can eat four balls of kenkey and cry for more, but is given only two balls, he can get angry and start breaking louvres.
The chop money size also depends on the level of nutrition typical of each family. Some families believe in the third world theory that QUANTITY is better than QUALITY. The bigger the banku and the smaller the fish, all the better for Ghanaians. Yes quantity, not quality. Such families stock maize in bags.
Those who believe in quality spend much on vegetables, meat and fish and therefore spend more, but it is worth it because they are healthier and stronger. They also spend on fruits and are averse to the “quantity supremacy” theory.
The problem with chop money issues is that when the correct amount is not flowing, the women think the men are misapplying their salaries in overt pleasures. They accuse their husbands of drinking too much bitters and burukutu, and they can prove the accusation using a formula. They only have to smell the breath of their partners. The fuse can be great!
One woman told her neighbour when her husband comes back home drunk, he behaves like a walking distillery, swaggering like a drunken sailor. You’d think he has been baptised with raw akpeteshie or immersed in the stuff. Her only compliment was that in spite of his alcoholic status, the guy could perform. That is Viagra or no Viagra.
Women also accuse men of chasing other women in the same manner as a he-goat does. Half their salaries cannot be accounted for as a result, they claim. So when the chop money isn’t at least at sea-level, they must protest either noisily or stage a sit-down strike.
Domestic sit-down strikes by wives can cause problems. When a man takes full quarter and is expecting a wonderful dinner with soup and its accompaniments and comes to meet an empty table and a brooding woman, he can go berserk. The clash can be worse than a plane crash.
As it were, it all requires patience to make a marriage last, chop money or not.
This article was first published on Saturday, July 11, 1998
