Our God or their God?

By Kofi Akordor
Sometimes I am tempted to ask whether the God that we worship so much with noise is the same God that created our brothers with white skin. Do not blame me. We are so different; not for the better. Events in history and our circumstances lead me into that temptation.
Imagine a white-skinned man who out of sheer adventure came to our part of the earth. Friendly as we are, we carried this man in a hammock while some of our own people walked barefooted hacking the path through the forest for this white man until we got to the river banks where some of our people were already farming and others were fishing.
Many years later, we told as a fact that the white man who was the burden of our grandfathers was called Mungo Park and that he came from his country to come and discover us and the river we led him to. Many years after independence, we continue to have such silly questions as: “Who discovered the source of River Niger?” in our text books and our learned professors do not find any wrong with that twist of history.
Having planted this seed of inferiority complex in us, our brothers with the white skin embarked one of the greatest damages and humiliations any group of people could suffer. That was the slave trade. That saw the massive haulage of human cargo across the Atlantic to the Americas to work on farm plantations.
The evangelisation which followed stripped us of whatever was left of our natural heritage. We were told we did not know God and the word PAGAN was crafted for our use only. New names were given to us since our local names were satanic and could not be found in the books of our creator. We have since lived in the shadows of others.
So while Arabs, Chinese, Indians, Koreans and Europeans have their religions, we blacks have to fall on that of others before we can see the face of God. Whether we have succeeded or not is a different matter. But if poverty, disease, ignorance and hunger is the prize for worshipping the God they came to preach to us about, then we will say we have had enough.
Slavery and colonialism are things of the past but it seems the scars will not vanish. We continue to nurse the wounds of the past and cannot think our ways forward. As we continue to celebrate our independence, most public projects are at a standstill or have not commenced because we are waiting for a Chinese loan. In other words, without any external intervention, our life is meaningless. Why should it be so?
The great Bob Marley said it; that in the midst of abundance, the fool will still be hungry. Our case is like someone who is standing by a river bank and is still complaining of thirst. And are we not thirsty as a nation even though we have large water bodies that flow watefully into the sea? As you read this, Tema, our industrial city and parts of Accra, the national capita,l are without water because of repair works at Kpong, where the bulk of water supply comes from. Why we should rely on one major supply point of this vital comodity is itself an enigma. So ours is not because we do not have water. We are not capable of bringing the water that is available in abundance to our homes and industries. Bob Marley was right. That is why I want to know whether something went wrong during creation or whether we do not have a direct link to our creator?
Why is it that there is poverty and misery everywhere the black person finds himself? Those of us on the mother continent are not doing well with all the resources at our disposal. Those in the Diaspora, in places like Haiti, are not faring any better.
South Africa is the light on the continent obviously because of its white population. Cote d’Ivoire, until the recent political turmoil, was moving at a fast pace because of a strong French presence. Kenya is also not doing badly because it has a large Asian population which is made of serious business people. That tells a story about ourselves as people with a black skin.
Malaysia and Brazil are major cocoa producers but are not net exporters of cocoa beans. They have moved more than two steps forward by processing a larger part of their cocoa beans for value addition.
Two months ago, we celebrated the production of a million tonnes of raw cocoa beans. Meanwhile, most of the cocoa products in the supermarkets and being peddled by street vendors come from Malaysia or from the factories of the food giants such as Kraft and Nestle. Cocoa products are still a delicacy to a population which continues to hear the wonderful things cocoa has done and is still doing for this country.
Gold digging is now the craze and it appears what we call ‘galamsey’ has come to stay. The people have seen their mineral wealth going to build empires elsewhere and will not sit down again to wallow in poverty. So they will go anywhere there is gold.
We have enough resources to divert attention from gold if we can spare a few moments to think. Look at the vast Volta Lake. Tourism alone can take a lot of our young men and women off the streets if we can put that God-given resource to productive use. Any other country like Switzerland would have utilised this vast lake for money-generation and job-creation. We are still searching for solution to our unemployment and poverty problems with idle talks.
The cocoa industry can employ a lot of people if we can take the excitement from the exportation of raw cocoa beans. The aluminium industry is another major area of massive employment, apart from spearheading the country’s industrial effort.
We do not need to destroy our forests in the name of exporting timber only to turn round to import plastic furniture from outside. There are many things we can do for ourselves if our political discourse will be progressive.
Unfortunately that is not the case now. Our political debates are vile, acrimonious and vindictive. We do not care to boast the use of any means to gain or retain power. Patriots who have the interest of the country at heart cannot talk the way most of our political activists are doing. The objective can only lead to one thing — to loot and plunder.
If it is true that God made man in his own image, we have to shed that beggar image and regain our self-worthiness. We have everything to build a healthy and prosperous nation. Today we are being coerced to embrace homosexuality for aid. Obama and David Cameron will not tell that to the Chinese because they have through their own hard work crossed that barrier and are now they are in the position to call the tune.
We have more than enough to do the same or even better. Let us agree that there is nothing like foreign aid and gird our loins for our own survival. So if I question the formula for creation, I do so because in the midst of abundance, we are still hungry and still begging.

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