Random Musings – March 2019
Posted by By Akogun Akomolafe at 21 March, at 09 : 49 AM Print
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“One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised” – Chinua Achebe
Hey, Femi Akomolafe, my friend, where have you been all these days, weeks, years… Ehn…
Good afternoon to you.
Is that all you are going to tell me? Ehn… Wow. I have missed you! What happened????
What happened to what?
You! You will never change! You used to write all those angry polemics in the newspapers and suddenly you went AWOL without even saying a goodbye. Where have you been?
Here and there.
What do you mean “here and there”? Anyway, it is good to see you. Welcome. Welcome. Shall we look forward to reading your pungent fireworks again?
I don’t know, ooooo. I will continue to observe and report.
Good, good. I missed your observation and your reporting. What you decide to do, just don’t leave us in a lurch, just like that. Okay!
Yes, Sir!
Carry on!
“The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the ‘capabilities’ of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.” – Eric Hobsbawm
News Item: March 6 is Independence Day
I know, I know! 61 years of “independence” and we still lack the competence to treat water and pipe it into our homes.
In few days, our officials will zoom around in their gleaming Jeeps and speechify themselves into stupor. Our intellectuals will extol the virtues of the borrowed socio-Political and economic systems that are delivering only miseries to our people!
I spent today (Independence Day, March 6) at East Cantonments in Accra. This is where the country’s Super Elite live.
If you haven’t been there recently, try to visit and observe.
When I write about my experiences, some people mistook it for TOO Know.
Those that are badly misruling us and mismanaging our national affairs are no FOOLS! They know exactly what they are doing.
They know the correct things to do – they stayed, studied abroad and they still visit.
They know that we are complete fools. They know that many of us possess the mental aptitude of imbeciles. That explains why they keep on fooling us with their phony arguments and pseudo wars. They know that we do not possess the minds that is sophisticated enough to recognize the con game they keep on playing us. Anyone but stupid idiots would have realized that both the NDC and the NPP are tow sides of the same bad coin, and would have recognize that WE are engaged in a classical CLASS Warfare.
The Elite (I actually prefer the word PREDATORS), whatever partisan political gown they don, will never fail to recognize and fight for their interests. They threw sands into our faces, and while we are offing ourselves fighting useless tribal and religious wars, they have captured the state. They and their families have firmly seconded themselves at every strategic position in the land while they tell us that they are going to fight boot for boot. How many of their children will join the protests and the marches they call?
How many of their children are even in the country?
Instead of buying into and parroting their rotten lies, why do we not ask them why they always manage to create the most comfortable environment that is guaranteed to cushion them against the deleterious effects of their policies?
At East Cantonments, I did not see a single Church or a Mosque. There reside the same people for whom a Cathedral is a priority of priorities!
THINK about it!
“But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course, it matters to all of us that London’s economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain’s GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can’t, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can’t, don’t brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.” – Eric Hobsbawm
News Item: TV3 is taking Donation for street boy, Hakeem
Bless!
A very good gesture indeed, but it would be greater if our officials can stop zooming around in their v8s and sit down and plan how to move the nation forward.
As I have always maintained, citizens of a Modern State should not depend on charity.
Philanthropists can help, but it is the duty and the responsibility of the state to take good care of citizens, most especially children and the vulnerable.
“Human mental identities are not like shoes, of which we can only wear one pair at a time. We are all multi-dimensional beings. Whether a Mr. Patel in London will think of himself primarily as an Indian, a British citizen, a Hindu, a Gujarati-speaker, an ex-colonist from Kenya, a member of a specific caste or kin-group, or in some other capacity depends on whether he faces an immigration officer, a Pakistani, a Sikh or Moslem, a Bengali-speaker, and so on. There is no single platonic essence of Patel. He is all these and more at the same time.” – Eric Hobsbawm
https://citinewsroom.com/2019/03/05/ghanas-import-duty-highest-in-sub-saharan-west-african-guta/
And officials tell us of their plans (or are they hallucinations) to make Ghana the Gateway to West Africa.
Do they travel around the sub-Region to get acquainted with their surroundings?
“Economists who simply advised leaving the economy alone, governments whose first
instincts, apart from protecting the gold standard by deflationary policies, was to stick to financial orthodoxy, balance budgets and cut costs, were visibly not making the situation better. Indeed, as the depression continued, it was argued with considerable force not least by J.M. Keynes who consequently became the most influential economist of the next forty years – that they were making the depression worse. Those of us who lived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impossible to understand how the orthodoxies of the pure free market, then so obviously discredited, once again came to preside over a global period of depression in the late 1980s and 1990s, which, once again, they were equally unable to understand or to deal with. Still, this strange phenomenon should remind us of the major characteristic of history which it exemplifies: the incredible shortness of memory of both the theorists and practitioners of economics. It also provides a vivid illustration of society’s need for historians, who are the professional remembrancers of what their fellow-citizens wish to forget.” – Eric Hobsbawm
News Items: China’s People’s Congress opens in Beijing – http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/news/
China, with its Mammoth economy, (US$16T and still counting) make do with a part-time Legislature. Chinese law-makers are drawn from every facet of society and they all have their professions. They gather once in a year to take care of enacting necessary laws for their country and go back to their homes and their professions.
Ghana, with a struggling neo-Colonial economy that is totally dependent on foreign support maintains a full-time parliament, complete with a v8 and other goodies and freebies for the 275 members.
Ooops, how many Ministers are there again????
And WE all pretend to be ignorant of the source of our woes!!!
“On the whole, however, it was accepted that money not only talked, but governed. All the industrialist had to get to be accepted among the governors of society was enough money.” – Eric Hobsbawm
“It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx.” – Eric Hobsbawm
News Item: Government fumes over CNN coverage of child labour on the Volta River
Our legendary hypocrisy will still be our undoing. We are at our elements when we see no evil, hear no evil, smell no evil, don the sharpest garb of hypocrisy and pretend that everything is jolly!
Very good citizen!
Our officials and the hyper-patriots among us are jumping up and down like yoyos to condemn the CNN, and pretend that they are not aware of the appalling conditions in which many of our children eke out miserable existence daily!
Mind you, I don’t watch the Constant Negative News, but we cannot pretend that this problem does not exist!
If only WE will, occasionally, come out of our Comfort zones and try to relate to our own people without unnecessary officialdom, maybe we can begin to appreciate what they are going through.
That, IMO, is the first step necessary to take in order to solve their problems, most especially the very basic ones!
As it were, our elite are far too removed from our realities that it is pure delusional to expect them to solve our problems.
That explains why they jet off to London, Paris, Dubai, Shanghai etc for their shopping, while they threw a Cathedral into our faces and ask US to die and go to heaven before we can enjoy what they take for granted here and now!
“The gods are not to blame” – Ola Rotimi
“As a means of alleviating poverty, Christian charity was worse than useless, as could be seen in the Papal states, which abounded in it. But it was popular not only among the traditionalist rich, who cherished it as a safeguard against the evil of equal rights… but also among the traditionalist poor, who were profoundly convinced that they had a right to crumbs from the rich man’s table.” – Eric Hobsbawm
About the Author
Femi Akomolafe is a passionate Pan-Africanist. A columnist for the Accra-based Daily Dispatch newspaper and Correspondent for the New African magazine. Femi lives in both Europe and Africa and writes regularly on Africa-related issues for various newspapers and magazines.
Femi was the producer of the FOCUS ON AFRICANS TV Interview programme for the MultiTV Station.
He is also the CEO of Alaye Dot Biz Limited Dot Biz, a Kasoa-based Multimedia organisation that specialises in Audio and Video Production. He loves to shoot and edit video documentaries.
His highly-acclaimed books (“Africa: Destroyed by the gods,” “Africa: It shall be well,” “18 African Fables & Moonlight Stories” and “Ghana: Basic Facts + More”) are now available for sales at the following bookshops/offices:
- Freedom Bookshop, near Apollo Theatre, Accra.
- The Daily Dispatch Office, Labone – Accra
- WEB Dubois Pan-African Centre, Accra
- Ghana Writers Association office, PAWA House, Roman Ridge, Accra.
- African Kitchen in Amsterdam Bijlmer
Where to buy them online:
On Lulu Books:
18 African Fables & Moonlight Stories https://goo.gl/Skohtn
Ghana: Basic Facts + More: https://goo.gl/73ni99
Africa: Destroyed by the gods: https://goo.gl/HHmFfr
Africa: It shall be well: https://goo.gl/KIMcIm
Africa: it shall be well
on Kindle books: https://www.createspace.com/4820404
on Amazon books: http://goo.gl/QeFxbl
on Lulu Books: https://goo.gl/SQeoKD
Africa: Destroyed by the gods
on Kindle books: https://www.createspace.com/4811974
on Amazon books: http://goo.gl/1z97ND
on Lulu Books: http://goo.gl/KIMcIm
My Lulu Books page: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/FemiAkomolafe
Get free promotional materials here:
- Africa: it shall be well: http://alaye.biz/africa-it-shall-be-well-introduction-in-pdf/
A FREE Chapter of ‘Africa: It shall be well’ could be downloaded here: http://alaye.biz/africa-it-shall-be-well-a-free-chapter/
- Africa: Destroyed by the gods (How religiosity destroyed Africa) http://alaye.biz/africa-destroyed-by-the-gods-introduction/
A FREE Chapter of ‘Africa: Destroyed by the gods’ could be downloaded here: http://alaye.biz/africa-destroyed-by-the-gods-free-chapter/
Contact Femi:
Femi’s Blog: www.alaye.biz/category/blog
Websites: www.alaye.biz, www.akogun.tv
Femi on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/author/femiakomolafe
Twitter: www.twitter.com/ekitiparapo
Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/alayeclearsound;
Gmail+: https://plus.google.com/112798710915807967908;
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/femiakomolafe
Email: fakomolafe@gmail.com
Kindly help me share the books’ links with your friends and, grin, please purchase your copies.
Comradely,
Femi Akomolafe
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