Thursday, February 21, 2013
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Have
you got anything for me?
Generally, we don’t get the law enforcement
we deserve.
I suppose a great litmus test on the
quality of a culture is the behaviour of its police force. In the UK, a vast, conspiratorial
network of corruption has recently been uncovered relating to football
tragedies, phone hacking, framing suspects and everything in between. But on
the streets, generally, you feel that law and order prevails without the taint
of bent behaviour on the law’s part.
Wherever I have travelled, either for work
or for pleasure, I can, more or less, remember what the police were like. Back
in 1968 when I was in Paris during the student revolt as an active supporter,
the police were baton crazy against these leftist destabilisers of the State.
On one occasion we were relaxing away from the barricades having a picnic on the
Seine. A police van drew up and a half dozen stick wielders charged down.
“Speak English, for God’s sake,” said a French friend. We did. They said we
were there for sex and would soon have our clothes off. We pretended,
vociferously, not to understand. Eventually they went off, batons unbloodied.
I was in an insolvent New York in the early
1980s. The train from the airport was as heavily guarded as I can ever
remember. In fact an entire train had been ‘stolen’ not long before. I had to
ease past two police officers at the doors of an extraordinary caterpillar of a machine,
multi-coloured carriages with inner city graffiti, as though it was camouflaged to pass through downtown garishness. They were brusque – and frightened. When we set off
they walked up and down the aisles as though one of us was Matt Damon from the
Bourne Trilogy and they were going to discover who. What do you do? Shut your
eyes and ostrich the journey out, hoping that when you open them you will be in
Grand Central Station and safe?
In Uzbekistan I was giving an impromptu
lecture on the street when I got jostled by secret police, remnants of the KGB,
I assume. They had taken exception to my using the word democracy. I remember that their firearms seemed more threatening because they were in plain clothes. As
though wearing a uniform ensures that the would-be shooter is constrained by 'procedures’. While in Tashkent, a Canadian friend had some money
stolen. The police came and took away the house staff and beat them for a
couple of days until one owned up. We never knew whether the boy had committed
the act or couldn't take more bruising. We wouldn’t have told the police had we
known – even though the theft was quite major.
I could go on and on with stories but want
to say something about police in Ghana. Everyone without fail here knows that
corruption is everywhere. Whatever your misdemeanour (mostly on the roads) you
will find yourself searching for a polite way of offering them money. They are
not interested in your explanation of being stranded on a crossroads because
you avoided being hit by a taxi running a red light, for example. An attempted
explanation is met with the non-sequitor, “Are you trying to tell me my job?”
In this case I eventually dredged up a useful phrase from my wide lexicon,
“Can I make a contribution to the police station?” And we were free.
A driver of ours, gentle and late middle
aged, was cuffed and thrown into a police cell for training a learner without
his licence which he had left at home along with the boy's. They were taken to
court and outlandish fines levied by a judge whose complicity with the police
was painfully evident and whose loyalty to the State’s revenue stream via
fining was paramount. Police can use a variety of indirect requests for palm
greasing but my favourite euphemism, at a
barrier on the way to Cape Coast, is “Cleanse my blood.”
Ghana has everything to be a prosperous
nation. It has an extraordinary GNP largely from oil and cocoa, a genuinely
peace-loving population, enough rain to help farming feed its population. There
is no reason why corruption should be endemic from politicians all the way down
to a police force that is reimbursed reasonably well when compared to the rest
of the population. But everyone pays their bribes, from doctors to road sweepers,
from water sellers letting traffic cops take a sachet without payment
to allow them to sell illegally by the lights, to bankers wanting to park on yellow
lines. You cannot deal with governmental bodies such as customs without bribes
if you are in international business, or your goods could remain forever
untouched and gathering hamatan dust in a bonded warehouse.
For Ghana to become a developed country,
corruption has to be tackled. Loyalty to family, clan and tribe – which pressurizes
individuals to bend the rules and siphon off money - must somehow be subordinated to a
loyalty to the State. In return the State must reward public loyalty with fair
justice for all. Trust in the police at a day to day level is paramount or the economy will always
fail.
Labels: #Policeing. #Ghana. #Corruption.
Friday, February 15, 2013
Intelligence intelligence everywhere but who can stop to think?
A young man here in Ghana is expanding his
knowledge of the world by asking questions. He came from a village in the north
and much of what he believes is so indelible it is difficult to shift. He
believes that female circumcision keeps women from being promiscuous “and many
women ask for it’. When I ask him whether it should be the case that any man
who has a woman circumcised should also be circumcised, he doubles up in
laughter. What kind of world is that? He believes that it is impossible to not
believe in God and finds my extreme agnosticism part of a stand-up comic
routine. He believes that the sun goes round the earth and, on occasion, the
moon swallows the sun. He thinks that the moon is small. The idea of a moon
landing has never made itself part of his consciousness. He believes he cannot
bring me bad news and so won’t tell me when things might be going wrong in the
business. He lies, in western terms, when he says he is not smoking to an older
woman who is working alongside him and finds the odour reprehensible. Three
times. Biblically. Later I ask him why and he says it is wrong to inform his
‘mother’ of such things. He was brought up to treat all older women as his
mother and all older men as his father. He has been taught by the Company to
use the internet, Photoshop and Word though he has only been speaking and
writing in English for five years. He is the best photographer we have ever encountered.
He has an eye for how to bring out the essential nature of textiles. At the
same time he has no sense of how the internet works and connects people or that
there are satellites in the sky or that people have unique postal addresses.
Being from a village and uneducated, his existence
was different before he came to Accra seeking a better life. It was opportunistic.
A matter of survival. Very little was planned. It was a matter of reacting to
what was thrown at you. Only the imperatives of sowing and reaping and
husbandry necessitated planning. So, with his very clever mind, he does work of
a very high standard – but he cannot plan it yet. His approach to problem
solving is as opportunistic as when he was in his village. Scattergun. Trial
and error. No methodical steps. He is learning chess to try to lay down a sense
of strategy in his mental processing, the moves that might make the future
better for him - and the Company.
Sometimes he is so certain that he is right
that he cannot hear you ask him to do something at odds with his world view. He
is the product of a lack of educational provision and an evangelical Christianity
that does not encourage critical thinking. Jesus has supplanted the old Gods
and provides an answer to everything. Just pray.
We have thirty plus ‘blue collar’ workers.
We pay them three times the national basic wage for the work they do. We bring
in free literacy and numeracy and IT. We train them. They work according to
western notions of a seven hour day and a five day week. They are all bright
and intriguing individuals making their way in a new culture, far removed from
their upbringing. The demands are often alien to them. They cannot see what is
going on, what is behind what they are being asked to do. The peoples from
developed countries are born into something that they are not.
To run a company along western lines in Ghana requires a very
sophisticated sense of cultural dissonance and a realisation that sheer
intelligence, which is everywhere here, is compromised by early conditioning in
worlds so far removed from what a foreigner might assume to be the case. The
logics that underpin the way that people from developed countries behave are
not the logics of the traditions of village and tribal life. Ghana’s GNP is
among the highest in the world. What will it spend its oil money on? Health and
education? Hardly. There is little
middle class desire to change the lives of the poor. Ghana needs its own Marx.
A velvet educational revolution.
It is saddening in the extreme.
The Magus travels among a hundred cultures
and discovers cultural dissonance for himself! www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Labels: #©hana. Cultural dissonance. Deprivation and opportunity.
Friday, February 08, 2013
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Feeding
the five thousand
A funeral. 500 mourners. The body of the
deceased on display for the file past. In Ghana it is hard to gauge how many
people will turn up. You don’t send invitations after all – you post the day of
the funeral in the popular press. Ghana state television also has exceedingly
long sections where the obituaries are read out and the place and the time of
the funeral are stated. Dress can be critical. Black for an untimely end. White
for a ripe old age. Certain mixes representing subtleties of life span and
illness.
The problem in Ghana is that people you
would never expect to see, turn up. As I have said before, funerals are social
imperatives as well as having
their obvious, deeply spiritual side. Rather like being one of the five thousand being fed, it
is possible to go to a funeral once or twice a week and be fed. No-one is going
to question your presence. There is also the widely held conviction among Christians
that the more that turn up, the better the acceptance in heaven. It has a prid
pro quo element, too. When it comes to your turn to take the bus to that far
off land from which none return, everyone will reciprocate and be there for
your collection of the ticket and making sure you are seated comfortably with paeans
of praise ringing in your ears as the coach draws away.
As a religious ritual, I found the 18th
and 19th century hymns dreary. Their view of a just warrior god,
smiting his enemies and meting out justice with arcane references to Babylon
and the time of David, was surreal. The tunes (Methodist) hardly lifted spirits, even
the post-formal ones with a sprightly reggae beat from the all purpose electronic
music-box. On top of this, the bishop, rather than spending time on the
biography of the deceased, chose to vilify Christianity’s competitors,
highlighting ‘universalism’ which he defined as allowing everyone from any other religion into heaven.
This could not be. His God was very particular and certainly wouldn’t admit into
the vaulted reaches of heaven, those who strove under the base illusions of karma
and reincarnation.
What was moving was the reverence for the dead and the desire
to venerate the departed in her last moments as an intact person (no scattered
ashes, yet.) The very elderly, some a decade older than the 82 year old
deceased, filed past her on walking sticks and in wheelchairs, gazing upon her
embalmed and not-too recognizable features, seeing in her marble austerity
their own faces and their own ends of days. To some extent it raised a
celebratory breath in my lungs, despite the grim solemnity of the proceedings. It was stirring and authentic.
There are blogs before this one that
suggest we write living wills, choreograph our endings and decide exactly how
much of our mix of good, bad and indifferent should be the subject of tributes.
This might be in a church, mosque, temple or synagogue or a venue of humanist irreverence.
Choose your hymns NOW, or your classical pieces, or your rock anthems, write your
autobiographical parting or record it– the last everyone will hear from you about your life; what joys and tribulations you are leaving behind. Decide on your mode of
transport to infinite oblivion or the golden-lit, crystal sea beaches and verdant pastures
of paradise and give your mourners a break. Liberate them from
mouthing homilies and glossing uncomfortable truths. Let them say what they
actually think. That is the mark of a true celebration of a life.