Mariam Mariam
It is Tuesday morning and I am writing these lines in Room 101 of the SUNLODGEHOTEL, located in the Tesano Quarters of Accra, the capital city of Ghana. I have been lodged here since last Monday and had in fact written last week’s piece, AFTER THE GENERAL STRIKE, from the same room. About two weeks ago, the Media Foundation of West Africa based here in Accra had invited me to study civil society-events taking place on the margins of the African Union (AU) Summit, which Ghana has been hosting since Sunday.
I had worked with Professor Kwame Kari Kari and the other people in the Media Foundation in ‘the past, and when we met again at the World Editors’ Forum in Cape Town, South Africa, four weeks ago, he had mentioned the fact that my trip to Darfur last year was going to be a useful backdrop to the invitation he was going to be Sending to me for the events around the African Union Summit. So last Monday, I returned to Accra, the city that I last visited three years ago. And what an auspicious time to visit Ghana: it is celebrating fifty years of independence; it is hosting the Unity Summit of the African Union and to crown it all, over four hundred million barrels of crude oil has just been discovered in some offshore oil fields and so effusive was the Ghanaian leader, President Kuffour, that he told the world that Ghana would soon become an African Tiger!
What strikes a visitor to Ghana today is the depth of optimism about the future and pride in the pioneering endeavour of the country in the struggle against colonialism. Ehab Abdel Hamid, a journalist from Egypt, told me that he found the patriotism of Ghanaians truly amazing. Trees are covered in the national colours of green, gold, and red, while every vehicle on the road seems to carry a miniaturized size of the national flag and at the opening ceremony of the AU Summit, the national colours were the dominant shade on the dresses of people. It is truly a wonderful time to be Ghanaian. It is also interesting to note that the colours of optimism not shade off completely the underlining stresses and strains in a society that has carried the implementation of neo- liberal policies to the heights that most African countries have not yet reached.
Ghana has always been presented as the success case of capitalist neo-liberal reforms where the state sector has been dismantled and handed over to the private sector. There are many new cars on the streets of civil society organisations have continued to proliferate, but there is a lot of unemployment in the country, especially amongst young people. Just like in Nigeria, the new capitalism in Ghana apparently does not create decent jobs for people, so there are many vendors of pure water and “recharge” cards on the streets (in real terms swelling the ranks of the urban lumpen population).
The media is very vibrant and the current debate is around the decision of the government to sell the Agricultural Development Bank to the South African STANBIC group. From what I have gathered, the decision is not popular with the Ghanaian people, and on one of the numerous FM stations here, I heard an old Nkrumahist railing against the sale of the bank. A Ghanaian journalist who ·worked in Nigeria during the early 1980s told me that the urge to sell the bank was fuelled by the fact that it made an annual profit of about 300 million American dollars from handling Western Union monetary transfers from ‘expatriate Ghanaians. By selling it, he told me, the hoping to corner that profit; they would then close the rural branches on the grounds that they were not profitable. Credits to small farmers will disappear and many workers will lose their jobs.
Of course, it is the general picture of privatization everywhere in Africa. It seems to me that the most monumental fraud which capitalism has perpetrated around the world since the end of the Second World War was the triumph neo-liberalism, expressed in the could ascension to power of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald scorching fir,? Privatization of national assets, My views about this are well-known already, but in Ghana, I got a confirmation of my conclusions.
In the globalised world of neo-liberal capitalism, there is a surfeit of consumer goods of all hues, mass produced in the factories of Europe, America and the newly industrialized countries of Asia. A huge “mediaplex” has arisen conjoined in an incestuous relationship with big capitalist monopolies to condition the minds of people just to consume and consume (an advert I read somewhere once puts that “I buy so I am”!). The citizen is dead, long Live the consumer!! There is so much glitz in a world where it has become easier for young people in the developing Countries to know the colour of the underwear that pop musicians wore in a concert the week before in Los Angeles than knowing the history of their own countries. Advertisements in the media titillate the senses of the potential consumer, yet the reality is that “income generation is thoroughly deformed, so people are obliged to do anything to be able to purchase, “to belong” and would therefore be willing to commit all kinds of crimes.
The complex we are dealing with has many dimensions. Wherever neo-Liberalism has triumphed, its gods insist on the whittling down of the powers of the trade union movement, preferring in fact, a casualisation of labour, because when the working people can combine to protect are their interests, the profit margin would be affected. The vision of the world available under the ruling orthodoxy is one of unbridled freedom for capital to move around the world and to exploit people in as free a manner as possible with the repressive apparatus of the state ready to operate at its behest to break resistance from its opponents.
Related to this is the restructuring of education, sue as was started by Oby Ezekwesili under Obasanjo. For neo-liberalism, the education which develops a critical faculty in students and makes them question the unjust order of the world is an enemy that must be “reformed”; this critical development of thought is then described a passé. For them, education should basically just produce technically-capable individuals available to work in the production lines of modern capitalism. Today’s graduate should just be an efficient contributor to the process of exploitation: he earns a good pay, wants to drive a good car, uses the latest iPod, thinks God he lives in America and should not bother about American imperialism’s aggression around the world or the injustices committee against peoples all over the planet.
As if this scenario is not frightening enough, a leadership suitable for this type of world of complete surrender to imperialism is imposed all around Africa, the so-called “IMF Presidents”. When the determination after independence was to build a self-reliant, productive economic base for our countries, develop national productive forces and become proud and active participants on the world stage, today the new leadership is one that does not trust or respect national expertise but worships at the altar of “experts” flown in from the United States. Short courses in American institutions have become the route to becoming “experts” on just one set of “values”: privatization, sale of national assets, devaluation of currencies and almost everywhere in Africa, these are done by offloading these national assets into the hands of cronies, who as we have seen in Nigeria under Obasanjo, are fronts for the big men presiding over the process. If the struggle for independence was waged, in order, that our countries would eventually be handed back to’ imperialism, with-the process of neo-liberalism, we might conclude that independence has not justified the sacrifices made-by the African peoples.
As I related at the beginning of this piece, these are thoughts and reflections which, being away from Nigeria and watching life unfold under the skies of Ghana, have been running through my mind. Travel is an incredible delight (it certainly was for that great traveller of the Middle Ages, Ibn Batutah); no wonder that the Hausa people say that it is the key of understanding (Tafiya mabudin ilimi).
I enjoy the opportunity to see how generations of humans have laboured within a specific geographical space to Master the forces of nature and in the process of producing the means of sustenance, have reproduced themselves and have also created what we broadly call culture in terms of ways of life, belief systems, technology, arts and crafts. In this broad sweep, we share the same humanity which belies all racist notions of superiority of culture, a baggage which arrived with slavery and was further reinforced by colonialism.
Sometimes too in my wanderings around the world, I feel very guilty about leaving home, especially when my children see that my bags are packed and ask me “Baba, where are you going again?” I feel the accusatory ring that is shot through that question, because I understand that they also want me to be there at home with them, so they can let me into their incredible world of being Children. I am sure that this is an emotion that every frequent traveller shares with me. The internet has made it much easier to follow events I around the world (and to also be part of them), and during 1\the past one week, the first thing I do soon as I get out of Room 101 is to surf the net (which is free and always available in this modest hotel) to read Nigerian newspapers. So you can imagine my surprise when I heard that President Umaru Yar’Adua was “an accessory to the fact of a coup” by lending his presence to Obasanjo’s illegal takeover of the machinery of the PDP. I have continued to believe that we must give Malam Umar a benefit of the doubt, with the hope that he would eventually hearken to the yearnings of the Nigerian people to move away from the suffocating influence which Obasanjo continues to push around. Malam Umar must be told by his reminders that he would not lift the burden of illegitimacy by pursuing the twin tract policy of Obasanjo’s caprices and sucking in the opposition into a so-called unity government. It just won’t work.
For as long as Obasanjo continues to hold court in his farm house, calling in operatives of the government house and such as Funso Kupolokun of the NNPC and Nuhu Ribadu of the EFCC as well as presiding over meetings with governors, National Assembly leaders and party chieftains, for that long will the impression last that President Umar Yar’ Adua is only sitting in the “real owner” of the throne in Aso Villa, Olusegun Obasanjo. Nigeria is being pulled through a most unacceptable phase of uncertainty when the people have tried to contain their anger and disappointment about the massive rape and robbery they suffered from Obasanjo and PDP bandits in the April elections. They were prepared to give a chance to the president imposed on them in very controversial circumstances; unfortunately, our man is doing everything to earn the anger and opprobrium of the country, and that is very unfortunate indeed.
I have spent the last week in Ghana attending the various civil society events on the margins of the AU summit; I have also been actively involved with the preparation of the platform of the African Editor’s ‘Forum (TAEF) for a proposed debate for selected African presidents from Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Liberia, Tanzania, DR Congo and Algeria, we began the preparations in Cape Town, South Africa during the World Editors’ Forum at the beginning of June. There were a number of points we considered should become part of the fabric of the African democracy, ranging from the removal of insults in laws from African legislations, the acceptance of Freedom of Information laws, The prohibition of detention of journalists, and closure of media houses and observers status for the media at the AU, amongst others. Despite repeated reassurances by the Ghanaian hosts, the debate could not hold because the leaders were not prepared and some were afraid to be interrogated by the media.
On a final note, there is that small matter of food and travel. I have an extremely sensitive stomach and I often have to travel with medications to ensure that a change of diet does not up-turn the logic of my stomach. I do not eat pepper yet I somehow find the taste of local food irresistible wherever I go. But there is also that longing for the taste of the Nigerian food, which was made so simple for me in Ghana by Dele Momodu, the publisher of OVATION magazine. We had travelled together from Lagos, and at the Accra airport, he invited me to visit his HOUSE OF OVATION restaurant at Osu. The ambience was very good and the selection of Nigerian dishes was truly mouth-watering. Let me add that the names given to their selection of drinks was as mischievous as they ever can be. It was good to be able to eat Nigerian food in Accra. In a globalised world, being able to eat pounded yam in Accra or semovita and egusi soup in Dubai are some of its positive acquisitions. You can be sure that I write next week’s column at home.
Oh, Hugh Masakela was also in Accra and he gave me an exclusive interview. One of my earliest favorites from his repertoire of songs came from his mid-1970s album, HOME IS WHERE THE MUSIC IS. Did you catch my drift?
