Painful realities

By Kofi Akordor
Every morning I have to do some mental calculations to determine which route to take for the trip to my office in central Accra. From where I reside at Sakumono, I have at least four alternatives and it should only be a matter of determining which would be the most convenient and the one that would bring me to central Accra in less than an hour for a distance that could not be more than 30 kilometres.
You may think that choosing one out of four and possibly more alternatives may be a simple thing to do. Unfortunately, the decision is a very difficult and mind-racking one.
If I decide to use the Nungua-Teshie route, I am likely to hit a traffic jam at the Nungua barrier. This will drag on through the Nungua and Teshie townships. At Teshie, more often than not, everything comes to a standstill because of the numerous arteries that feed into the main road with their load of vehicles. On a very busy day, which is the norm and not the exception, a motorist could spend more than one hour in traffic at Teshie alone.
By the time I clear what may be the last traffic hurdle at the La Palm Beach Hotel, and head towards Osu, I might have spent more than two hours crawling along with other motorists. On a lucky day, I may reach the offices of the Graphic Communications Group Limited in two-and-a-half to three hours after setting off at Sakumono very tired.
Another alternative is to use the Spintex Road. This is a road which started more or less like a private road serving a few factories operating in that area. The road derives its name from one of those factories, Spintex, a textile factory that has since been renamed Printex.
This road is now one of the busiest in the city, carrying heavy vehicular traffic from the numerous industrial, commercial and residential communities that have sprung along it, all the way to Nungua, Tema, and Ashaiman and beyond.
Even though its status as a factory road has changed many years ago to an important link between the eastern part of Accra and the city centre, Spintex has not seen any serious structural change. Efforts to improve the road have largely been cosmetic. That is why traffic on this narrow and pothole-filled road can be painfully slow. It is also on the Spintex Road that one could experience some of the worst forms of undisciplined behaviour on the part of commercial drivers who operate as if the Motor Traffic and Transport Unit (MTTU) of the Ghana Police Service does not exist.
On a normal day, traffic can crawl so slow that by the time you make the journey from Sakumono to central Accra, a trader travelling from Ho to Accra, a distance of 156 kilometres might have finished doing his/her business in the city and is on his/her way back to Ho.
The Mills Administration has embraced the problem and trying to do something about it. But my fears are that, at the slow pace work is going on, we may not have a different Spintex Road before we enter the next millennium.
If I choose to avoid the nightmare on the first two routes, then the next thing to do is to hit the Motorway via the Abattoir. Before you reach the Abattoir, you have to cross an improvised bridge constructed many years ago, when the new residential estates were not in existence. The bridge, which is more or less a toll bridge for a self-appointed traffic warden, is so narrow that only one vehicle could cross at a time and because of the heavy build-up at both ends in the mornings, it sometimes takes almost 30 minutes to cross the bridge.
After the bridge, the motorist has to turn towards Tema and change direction at the overhead bridge linking Ashaiman and Tema to face Accra. The so-called Tetteh-Quarshie Interchange at the Accra end of the Motorway can present its own challenges; so again I am likely to reach the office very exhausted and disorganised.
A fourth alternative which is available for consideration is the beach road through Sakumono village to join the harbour road. I feel sad anytime I am on this road. This is the road that links Accra, the capital city, to Tema, Ghana’s number one port city.
The narrow pothole-strewn road is a daily miserable reminder of how poorly we have conducted our affairs of state over the years. Even if we do not have the money to construct roads elsewhere, the roads that bring all the industrial, commercial and domestic goods into the country and freight our exports to the outside world should not be left in that miserable state.
So as I stated earlier, none of the four alternatives offers any comfort so the only thing to do is to join the madness and pray that God will take care of the rest. Whatever the case, precious time would be lost, litres of excess fuel would be burnt and many workers would get to the office very late, tired and not in the right frame of mind to deliver according to their duties. The return journey is not any better, but that is the agony commuters in Accra endure on daily basis.
As schools prepare to re-open for a new academic year, parents are at the end of their tether trying to get the right schools for their children.
The fate of most of the children who are not sure whether they would be studying under trees, tents or in dilapidated buildings is in the balance. Those lucky to have gained admission to tertiary institutions are going round in search of residential accommodation that has become an expensive commodity in many of our tertiary institutions.
There are many other areas where we have faltered seriously. More than 50 years after independence, this cannot be fair to be said of a country that claims to be aiming at middle-income status by 2015. This is not a good commentary for a country which for many decades prided itself as the world’s leading producer of raw cocoa beans — a produce which has made other countries and foreign companies very rich. Is it not an irony of circumstances that there is no cocoa tree in Switzerland, yet, Nestle, a Swiss company, is one of the largest producers of chocolate and dairy products using cocoa purchased mostly from Ghana?
At one time, Obuasi was acclaimed one of the richest gold mines in the world. Obuasi’s gold is almost depleted but Obuasi as a town is in ruins without any sign of the gold wealth it harboured in the bowels of its soil. Where have our gold resources gone to? What about the revenue from the other minerals like diamond, manganese and bauxite which we have been exporting all these years? Obviously the greater part of these natural resources has gone to make other sovereign nations better off than our own.
We have stripped our land bare of its forest cover in exchange for money that has not benefited the people in any significant manner.
Ours is not a Somalia, where since General Siad Barre fled to his death in 1991, had had no government. We have not experienced anything close to what happened in Liberia, Sierra Leone or Cote d’Ivoire, but it seems we have not made capital gain out of our political stability and democratic credentials which we continue to dangle before the international community.
These and many others are serious challenges that need to be addressed on daily basis. Our democracy, instead of galvanising us into action, unfortunately has created a situation whereby governments come and go without achieving much because of lack of consensus on a national development agenda.
Our democracy has made us so partisan that persons called upon to account for their stewardship in public office become instant heroes just by raising a party tune.
Our democracy, instead of directing our energies into productive ventures, has instead become a kind of spillway that has flooded our environment with insults, acrimony and ethnocentric sentiments.
We have become so politically divided that we prefer to turn the country into a cauldron of bitter emotions over a careless statement from a reckless politician instead of focusing on our national deprivations.
A new culture that has emerged and gradually eating deep into our political fabric is that phenomenon whereby a party in power is coerced and blackmailed into pandering to the dictates of groups calling themselves foot soldiers while at the same time trying to steer the ship of state.
Who says governments belong to political parties, and that a party in government must annex national assets for its members?
We are now pinning all our hopes on oil for all the things we failed to do in the past. The oil wealth, like others before it, will come and vanish without any appreciable level of development if we still have purposeless, visionless and corrupt politicians managing our affairs.
We may have very little to show for the oil wealth if we maintain the politics of winner-takes-all and segment the society into winners and losers or the government and the opposition.
Every day, we are confronted with some painful realities. These are realities that continue to remind us that we have a long way to go as a nation and, therefore, while savouring the freedoms that democracy has bestowed on us, we should do well to allow its fruits to reflect positively in our national life.

fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
kofiakordor.blogspot.com