Everything in Ghana is ‘Basaa’! – Part I

Sometimes, when the Western media put up bleeding news reports on Africa, we are quick to say that they are portraying the Continent in a negative light – but please pause and ask yourself when you last visited Ghana our Motherland!

For the purposes of this article, permit me to use the phrase ‘basaa’. After all, from the part of the Motherland where I hail, when everything is out of control, we say everything is ‘basaa’ and I would beg of readers to permit me to use that phrase because everything has been turned upside down in our country – everything has become ‘basaa’!

For the past couple of weeks, it’s been taking me at least two hours to do a 17 kilometre distance from my office to my Eastern Accra residence. However, I realised later last week that, maybe my drive time could be reduced if I waited a while longer and set out for home from the office after 6.30pm. Then I had a rude shock of my life when I had to wait for at least three hours in the horrible Accra traffic. On Wednesday, May 6, 2009 in particular, the hold up was as though everything had come to a grind in the smelling city!

I then decided to do a few checks on what might have horribly gone wrong and I came across a multiplicity of causative factors.

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) has put out a crazy statistic that in the first quarter of 2009 alone, an odd 30,000 plus vehicles had been registered. This statistic represents the first quarter vehicle registration for Greater Accra alone! Juxtapose this number against the narrow roads in Accra, coupled with the manholes on many of these roads and calculate the number of minutes you would do on the shortest distance in Accra!

Furthermore, it’s clear that all of those 30,000 plus cars would certainly not be stationed in Accra alone, but let’s also add the fact that because of the huge bureaucracy at the DVLA head office, some car owners prefer registering in the regions and driving them to Accra – call it car emigration!

I have travelled a bit but I have not yet come across a crazy planning system anywhere in the world that comes close to what we have in Accra. Just drive to the Tetteh Quarshie Roundabout and you’d appreciate what this writer is talking about.

Somebody slept in the plus Bellagio Las Vegas and decided upon returning to Ghana that he and his friends and other close associates must replicate the Sin City’s experience in Accra. He then inverts the Bellagio to ‘Hotel Villagio’. Fantasising further, the person decided that of all the places in Ghana, it’s only the Tetteh Qaurshie Roundabout that is most suitable for locating the project.

Because the trademark of a typically rich Ghanaian is to inconvenience the rest of the community with his ‘wealth’, the owners of the Hotel Villagio project decided to situate the facility on a world heritage spot. Everything there was once mangrove swamps, more, and I must confess that that area was where I first saw a flamingo with my own eyes. The place, which was cleared for the project was not only located at a swampy area, it also sits on a major drain. Furthermore, the Hotel Villagio sits on the main underground pipe that carries water from the Kpong head works in the Eastern Region to about two-thirds of Accra’s 4 million population!

So ask yourself, who in his Ghanaian wisdom might have approved the location of the facility in that swamp? Maybe, the millionaire owner was just too powerful to be told that it was not acceptable to build a facility like that in a waterway!

Another crazy millionaire who thinks that the more chocked the roads are, the more money he makes, also decided to build a mall at the Tetteh Quarshie Roundabout. I have heard many Ghanaians refer to Nigerians with all manner of invectives but I bet you, Nigerians have proven beyond every limit that they are intelligent. Even in crowded Lagos, the Mall is situated at the outskirts of town – so why make us stay in Traffic for hours because a city planner refuses to think and a politician decides to go barmy.

At the same Tetteh Quarshie Roundabout is the so-called ‘Hotel Kufuor’ or the African Regent Hotel – owned by the son of Ex-President Kufuor! If you blend all the three facilities mentioned above, it’s clear that the rich and powerful have conspired to make living in Accra hell for the rest of us! If the rich and most powerful were not behind these crazy developments, somebody would muster the courage to demolish at least two out of those three facilities!

Another thing that is causing the killer traffic in Accra is the fact that none of all the road construction firms operating in our country presently seems to understand the usage of electricity! The construction firms only work between 8 am and 6 pm – this is made even worse by the fact that all of these firms work on weekdays only!

I have been asking myself why some of these construction companies would not be asked by the city authorities to work only in the night to help ease traffic, but hey, native Ghanaian wisdom dictates that work is done only within eight hours and the rest 16 hours, man must sleep – because that’s the only way to increase productivity!

While the rest of the world is working every hour, we work for only eight hours a day, use the rest to sleep and gossip probably and yet sing the nonsensical mantra that we would reach middle-income status by 2015! Maybe, the rest of the world’s nations, which are already in the middle-income bracket, are waiting for sleeping Ghanaians to catch up with them – please note that the policy makers are the worse culprits!

If you want testimony of this, go to the ministries in Accra – the chaps there get to work at 10 am and by 3 pm, they are out of the office. Within those five or so hours that they stay in the offices, the air conditioners are at full blast and all lights are switched on – maybe, for the black man, light is meant for the day!

I think this discourse would go on for a very long time so before I bore you too much, have you realised that in Ghana, those who are the last to get anywhere are the ones who want to and are served first. If you doubt this, just go to a banking hall nearest to you – you would be shocked that while you want to be in the queue and be served when it gets to your turn, some pot-bellied man who comes last would want to be served first.

Mind you, he is a big man! In Ghana, the status of a man is defined by how big his stomach is and that ‘pregnant’ men are regarded as ‘big’ men! Reader, get on the roads and you’d realise that there are loads of drivers who would be driving on the hard shoulder of the road – because they are in a hurry to go to hell!

On a typical Ghanaian road, the nature of driving is such that the ‘normal’ person would begin to realise that almost all the drivers behave as though they have been given the hangman’s noose and that an umpire has been assigned to determine who gets to hell first!

Whatever the reason might be behind our behavioural pattern, I don’t know but I thought that the more ‘educated’ a person is, the wiser the person. Nevertheless, the very reverse seems to be the character trait of many a Ghanaian.

When our politicians travel anywhere in the world, they don’t see open culvert drains but then when they go for World Bank Loans, native wisdom tells them that the most durable type of gutters is the open culvert ones.

So all over Accra, open drains are the standard. Some say, oh, we don’t have enough financing to cover all the drains but, why not do the most durable type bit by bit?

In the meantime, think about the first stanza of our national anthem – because I think everything in Ghana has become ‘basaa’!

Source: Kojo Owusu-Mbire

Email: owusumbire@gmail.com