The Good… and The Bad

Another year, another stay in Ghana, another rendering of accounts. Let’s start with the bad:

1. Roads: There is a rapid uptick in the number of roads being repaired or expanded in Ghana. Some, like the Accra-Sogakope road, have been completed but others, like the New Hampshire highway, remain perpetually under construction. Of particular note, the Tetteh Quarshie Roundabout-Dodowa road looks rather similar to what it was a year ago. This has led not only to bone jarring bumps and car wrecking conditions but a lot of dust coating everything red and damaging our lungs.
2. Pollution: Of land, air and water. You’ve heard of the dust but what you haven’t heard are the multiple bush and other fires, and cars with bad exhausts spewing smoke into the air. I only breathe fresh air in my village. One still sees trash like (un?)pure water sachet bags on the ground and our water bodies are clogged or dead from dumping of trash and waste. And the smell, oh the smell...
3. Driving: If you take a taxi in Accra, sit at the back, put on your seat belt, and pray. From overspeeding through the bad roads, taking risky short-cuts, disrespecting road traffic laws, attempting to pass a mile of cars in a rush of oncoming traffic to riding the shoulders of roads, drivers in Ghana have invented a code that is neither safe in the least nor for the faint hearted. Why, I saw someone drive onto the shoulder of the opposite lane so one set of tires could avoid a speed bump.

The good:
1. The Changing Landscape: I now know not where Accra ends and the rest of Ghana begins. Inside and outside of the city, buildings are springing with rampant regularity along the major roads. It is turning the city into a really metropolitan one but also creating a suburban class. Maybe the economy is good after all.
2. Street naming exercise: This was started a while ago and continues. With Google map and GPS functionalities catching up or ahead of it, you can now find exactly where that wedding is held or a business is located without driving to the big tree and then finding the roasted plantain seller is not there to be asked for the rest of the directions.
3. The business climate: There has been a spur of investment in Ghana in recent years with an especial resurgence of the financial sector, among them real estate trusts, commercial and investment banks and private equities. They have provided employment to more than a few graduates, albeit at crazy work hours, and contributed to the glut of cars on our streets.
4. Rural business section of TV3 News: I was particularly gladdened to see a news station dedicate a part of the news hour to highlighting rural business successes and opportunities for financing. Being interested in business at the base of the pyramid and small scale enterprises, this is indeed, welcome news.

The unclassifiable:
I have noticed that in spite of government efforts to relocate them, street hawkers in our Drive-Thru Malls (apologies to Aisha Saaka), continue to run the roads. It is of course heartwarming to see people engaged in legitimate business but the risks of their trade—being run over by cars—and the fact that a lot of child labor goes into it as well gives me pause for concern. Did I miss something? Leave a comment, let me know.

Prime

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This is the way I choose, the destiny I pursue
To help the unfit and the fit
To treat each according to his need
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People and Places

On this stay in Ghana, three of my friends from business school visited and forced me to explore Accra more than I had previously cared to. These are some of the things I enjoyed doing. You will see some common threads of touristy things but also a yearning for the old.

1. +233 – The aptly named spot is on Ring Road central, between the Ako-Adjei interchange and the Kanda overpass. I spoke to one of the managers and learnt it was set up by three brothers for the 2010 World Cup. They brought their skills to bear so that you have a wide open space with the dark, starry African night as your ceiling, food and drinks overseen by one brother, and live Jazz music overseen by another. It is a very calming atmosphere, even romantic, and the food is affordable. On Sundays, you are treated to a live performance by Gyedu Blay-Ambolley, one of the pre-eminent Ghanaian musicians of old.
2. Chez Afrique – This East Legon joint is another place where live music and food mix at night. This one gives a blend of highlife, the smooth Ghanaian music of old, some hiplife—a blend of hip hop and highlife—and a touch of reggae from Marley to Dube. In contrast to +233 where the band is behind a glass wall, there is a dance floor where dancers interact freely with the musicians.
3. Labadi Beach Reggae Wednesdays – A GH₵5 charge will grant you access to this wide expanse of white sands and the roaring Gulf of Guinea where interspersed with the nicely decorated tables and chairs for drinks are pots of fire in the sand and an elevated stage with live reggae music spanning local creations, Peter Tosh, Bob Marley and Culture. It provides a nice mix of expatriates and locals if you are inclined to that atmosphere and you can dance your heart out into the wee hours of the dawn.
4. Buka – This is a surprisingly affordable restaurant in Osu with a nice afro feel and food from Nigeria, La Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. With bamboo paneling, wooden décor and a large neem tree blowing a nice breeze, the only anomaly is the flat panel blaring “Whip My Hair”. You can also down your grilled tilapia and banku, jollof rice and goat stew, ampesi and kontomire stew or fufu and groundnut soup with my preferred non-alcoholic frozen fresh palm wine which you can make alcoholic by fermenting through letting it sit. Do go after 1pm however because they are woefully understaffed and the food takes long in coming.
5. Bojo Beach – The traffic to and from this haven off the Accra-Cape Coast highway is horrible, and the road from the highway to the beach is a shame. It could take you anywhere from an hour to two from the center of Accra to get to this beach. The view of Bojo will wipe those memories away. Located on a sandbar between the Gulf of Guinea and a lagoon, one has to cross a moat and the river to get to it. The cruise, access to the beach and amenities will cost you GH₵6 and you are not allowed to bring food or drinks. Not to worry, they are relatively affordable. The beach itself has thatch structures providing shade, a volleyball net, a jet ski at GH₵15 per 5min cruise and a very swimmable sea. You can stay all day long. I have been here a few times and thoroughly enjoyed them all.

These are of course only a smattering of the many enjoyable places in Ghana – my friends went to Cape Coast and Kumasi among others – but these are the places I recently found and was thrilled to see exist. Next time you are in Ghana (and you should go to Ghana), try them out.

Prime

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This is the way I choose, the destiny I pursue
To help the unfit and the fit
To treat each according to his need
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The White Man is Dead

It goes by many names; bend-down-boutique, night-mall, second-hand. Yet, the name most widely associated with used clothing in Ghana is “Oburoni w’awu” viz “the white man is dead”. It is a rather morbid play on the fact that these are discarded articles. They were, for a long time, my boutiques (from my goalkeeping jerseys to my “cambous”) and have provided employment to many a Ghanaian. And now, some of them are being banned.

Oburoni w’awu is widely popular because it is very cheap, you can still get premium brands if you have a good eye, and you usually haggled with the seller from a likely 10 times markup to a 3-5 times markup knowing you’d been had but okay with that as well. Kantamanto, in Accra, is the commercial capital of the business with stalls selling anything from belts to suits. There, many of our likely-to-be-otherwise-unemployed youth make a legitimate living.

It all comes at a cost, of course. Locally manufactured goods are very expensive; I still cannot figure out why—is labor not cheap in Ghana? Do we not have raw materials? It may well be because of high fixed costs spread over low volumes of sales. Anyways, the cheaper Oburoni w’awu crowd out Ghanaian innovation and enterprise as these cannot compete on price.

I am not a protectionist and do ascribe to the theory of comparative advantage with each nation doing what it does best. However, two trends make me indifferent or supportive of this action. There has been an upsurge in the number of Ghanaians labeling themselves with made in Ghana goods since the previous administration. This is so even though they are premium priced. Their competition is now more from “first hand” Chinese clothing than second hand western ones. A ban should thus have little, if any effect on the nascent Ghana-made clothing industry.

More importantly, the health risks as laid out in the BBC article give pause for concern. Clothing in intimate contact with such disease prone areas as the crotch should probably not be shared, especially when they are not industrially cleaned before resale. Better a healthy population.

Sadly, this means some youth will be out of work for a while but these are highly entrepreneurial spirits and they will be back on their feet. Plus, I am sure they would not want to survive on peddling disease. Ideally, they will succeed in some innovative Ghanaian enterprise so that when, in future, we say the white man is dead, it would mean less and not more dependence on his castaways.

Prime

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This is the way I choose, the destiny I pursue
To help the unfit and the fit
To treat each according to his need
*************************************************

No Mr. Electoral Commissioner, I Will (might) Not Vote

As I wrote this, I had spent close to a month in my beloved country working on a project. I had thoroughly forgotten what it felt like to be cold and alone in a foreign land; I did miss my girlfriend. I wrote from the village in which I was born and the room in which I had slept many a night. The nostalgia may have made me put the “might” in the title. A month prior, it was, a strong “Will”.

Ghana, has changed and not only for the worse. Things got more expensive once the four zeros were dropped from our cedi, yes, but there is a certain sense of stability and dignified standing that I have not seen in a while, nay in my lifetime. And this is in the sphere of politics.

My readers know well I do not believe in the political system and the lack of alternatives in Ghana with a revolving door shuffling in the same thieves and looters (see The Politics of Recycling) every eight years. I had come to decide then, that even though I had recently registered as a voter in my country, actually voting was a waste of my time. Having never voted, I imagined it gave one a warm and fuzzy feeling to vote another into or out of power and maybe even turn the derelict on the corner into a wealthy baron overnight but I could not quite see the difference it made.

All most governments need do in Ghana is loot enough to sustain them the eight years of opposition before they get back on the horse. But two recent things have made me waver a bit. In the recent Ivorian crisis, President Mills came out against military intervention, a threat made by the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, of which Ghana is a signatory. Then he turned around and raised oil prices 30% to GH₵7 or about $5 per gallon thus removing most of the government subsidy. And he is up for re-election in a year.

Mills has his critics, chief among them me. He has been ineffectual on other fronts, has arguably been slow in prosecuting malfeasance in the past administration, allowed hooligans in his party to run loose and loaded his administration with old dogs. However, he has been very comfortable making unpopular decisions which he perceives, rightly or wrongly, to be necessary for the country’s progress and has stood calmly resolute in the face of an onslaught from his party and the opposition. Others have come close to doing similar things but Rawlings mostly did them in a dictatorship with no specter of electoral defeat and Kufuor went HIPC but spared more suicidal decisions till his second term when no further votes stared him in the face.

Mills may yet lose the next elections for a variety of reasons. The likely alternative, Akufo-Addo, I do not rate highly and has said some rather stupid, if overblown, things lately. But I may yet vote in those elections…for someone. Whoever it turns out to be, it will be someone, like Mills, who is convicted in their vision for the country and are willing to stake their political careers on it.

After all, the countless voting may be futile for many years but once in a blue moon, one comes along who is worth the struggle.

Prime

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This is the way I choose, the destiny I pursue
To help the unfit and the fit
To treat each according to his need
*************************************************