STAND UP AND SPEAK OUT!

People has sort to associate poverty with Africa and Asia for a very long time. Though this association to some extent is true, it is not entirely so. I believe a lot of people will be chastising the West for their role in the underdevelopment of Africa and the as a result poverty in Africa especially on this day. However, I will like to use this day to actually call on African leaders and Africans as a people to make our own effort to eradicate poverty not totally depending on the west.

When we take issues like traffic jams in the streets of Accra, we can see at least two way by which we lose resources;
1. productive hours are lost to traffic jams in the streets of Accra and the other regional capitals and;
2. at the same time, the amount of fuel wasted in these traffic jams each day, (I don’t want to think about that), will be enough for each one of those cars for another day.
These traffic jams also make the cost of transport high. If we do away with these unnecessary traffic jams, we will be able to save so much for national development agenda. This does not pertain to Ghana only talk about Ubungo - mwege road, ubongo - posta, Ubungo - gongo la moto in Dar es salaam, Tanzania. We see it on television in other place in Africa. In effect we can enrich ourselves by cutting our wastage and managing our things effectively.

For many years there have been talks of eradicating poverty in Africa by the west and believe you me, they have done their share. Imagine someone living in “financial crisis” stricken America paying huge tax and the money being sent down to Africa and Asia to eradicate poverty each year, tell me they haven’t done their bit? Yet we who receive these aids and grants do not use them well. We mismanage them and go asking for more (Oliver Twist).

I will not say we should accept aid or grants or even ask for them, NO! What I want us to do as a nation and a continent associate with poverty, disease and conflict is that we make conscious efforts to eradicate poverty ourselves. We learn to manage well our resource, we learn to plan with the future in mind, we learn to increase productivity and cut wastage, we implement measure that will check waste in our economies.

I believe if we do these and do them well. Implement them to the letter, we will eradicate poverty from African and Asia in the next 10 years but if we want to continue with our wastage, broken pipelines with treated water gashing out, huge traffic jams from three to five hours, producing under capacity in our industries and offices, using official hours to run private business and its likes, then even if all the money in the world is given to us, in the next two months, we will be poor again.
Let us stand up and be counted, let’s stand up and speak out against poverty not just in Africa and Asia but in the world as a whole.

Lack of creativity and Ideas

Do you know the single person with the most cars in Ghana? I bet you will want to know this statistics. (watch out when you pronounce the last word because a statistician who was interviewed on television in Ghana could not pronounce it well). It is.........................................



I won't provide that answer for free. I need to earn something for my hard work. However for your loyalty and cdfedication to my blog, i will tell you this for free. The few who read my blog will have this for free, the rest will have to pay to get the information. (Don't think about it they won't read, if it is on tv they will watch but read? IMPOSSICAN'T)



It is ......



"FOR SALE"



Whoever he/she is, own the most cars in Ghana. Not the government. ... (You wish!!)

'For sale' own most of the car in Ghana and to make us see that he owns them, he write his name on it; For sale.



But because we as Ghanaians luck creative and ideas, for sale's younger sister (also Ghanaian)has decided to follow in his footstep and also start writing her name on her cars



'BUY ME'
and then adds her numerous telephone numbers. How can one person own sooooo many telephone number? huh?



Enough of this uninteresting nonsense. The core of what i want to say is that, in Ghana a thing get in vogue and everybody wants it and after sometime it passes out and everybody is after the next thing in vogue .



I remember when i was a boy, all the kids but myself, wanted to be doctors ('but I' because i have never known what i want to be). In Junior High, they all wanted to be Bank Managers; i wonder what they were going to manage and whose money? when i enter High school, everybody wanted to be an accountant including science students. In the university, almost everybody was turning to IT because that was where the money was. Now, nobody talks about these careers with that much passion anymore. Everybody wants to work in a Bank not manage it but work there.



When one thing booms in Ghana, everybody wants to do it. we leave the rest to wither and die. Then when something new comes, we all rush for the new and leave what sustained us.



I don't know much about life but i know that it takes a football team to win a match and not an individual player. If all the defender of a team move forward with the goalkeeper to each score his/her own goal at every point in time, what do you think will happen to that team?



Let us be balanced and not all follow the same line. If we are not careful, we will all fall in the same pit. For a change may be i wll introduce the third sibling of For Sale and Buy Me, which will eventually become the largest ownern but i need to register the copyright first. Before i do i wouldn't mind sharing my creativity with you..... it is ......


"GET ME CHEAP"

WAKE UP MEDIA COMMISSION!

Today, I am in a bit of a fix as to what i should write. I am sad that as a tax payer, my money and that of others is being used to pay people who do not do the work they are assigned to do. I makes me feel violated like a young girls who has been violated by an oldman, old enough to be her great grandfather.

Supposing we are told that our tax are being used to pay people who are unemployed, it is understandable and makes sense but if people take up responsibility for something and they do not do it why should they be paid? some one please tell me!

Let me give you two of the complains I am making.

Do you ever listen to BLACK RASTA? I hope you don't and if you do be careful what you listen to. This dude permit me to call him that is just a diviant. A "social misfit" who has been given the power of radio to bug our earss with socially unacceptable remarks for which society just listen and laughs or ignore.

Do you also know that there is an institution called the National Media commission, who are tasked to regulate the media in Ghana? So do they mean to tell me they haven't heard what this "social misfit" has been saying? If they have, don't they feel it is wrong for anybody to promote smoking of anything especially marijuana on the airwaves?

Should the members of the media commission be paid then at the end of the month if
1. they have not heard such unacceptabel comments from the said presenter?
2. they do not see anything wrong with such comments?

Let me divert a little. Now to the management and owner of the station where this dude works do they see nothing wrong with what he says? Are they a bunch of loose cases or what? (pardon my words).I believe one of the basic things that differentiate humans from animals is the use of common sense and as such when humans fail to use common sense, we loose our sense of humanity.

I hope someday GTV or TV3, show this documentary "Geldof in Africa" and we get to see his opinion of the media in Ghana, which i am sorry to say is TRUE. Get to the news stands and all you see is sexually explicit magazines and on our radios people who do not know what it means to use the radio to educate people and promote peaceful coexistence of people bombarding us with their "IGNORAMUS".

I should say that I am also disappointed in the so-called schools of journalism and broadcasting in Ghana. They claim to teach well but if what they teach is what those who work on our airwaves do then they all need to be closed down.

My apologises to the few who have distinguished themselves in the work on the airwaves. I don't listen to Abeko Santana's drive programme on radio because he usually shouts and i don't like noise on my radio except if it is sports and i can't get it on TV. However, i think last friday, he really spoke very well. I don't want to believe it was because he had returned from America that day. I almost had goose bumps from what he said. Speaking like he did, educates people and give them a sense of humanity. Preaching peace, tolerance and togetherness is very important at this time but if we permit some "social misfits" and deviants to use the airwaves to divide us and teach immoral and socially unacceptable values, then we should be careful.

The media commission should act and act very fast to stop this bad picture being painted of our nation by our own people through our mass media or we should not blame the western media for painting a dark picture of Africa.

I will take the second part later but like they say

"A word to the wise is enough..."

GHANAMAN!!!

This post will seek to find answers to a few observation made by my friends about Ghanaian society. I hope so one is out there who can provide some form of response to them. I observed that whenever we get visitors at home in our part of the world, we either turn on the TV or put on the DVD player so that the person watches a movie. But for young guys who usually eat together with their friends, we turn to give them a well serve dish on an isolated table and leave them to eat whiles we eat in the kitchen or sit somewhere we will not get in the way of the visitor. Does anybody out there feel what i am saying? Let me know.

I suppose we do that with the intentions of making our guest feel welcomed and comfortable but are they comfortable when we do that?

Another thing is the claim by my friends that we (Ghanaians) are easily irritated. I don’t know about that but i know i am easily irritated by questions which the questioner knows the answer to. It does irritate me. It makes me feel stupid. But are Ghanaians easily irritated?

Just be careful in you attempts at answering this question so that you don’t get irritated. That was the case of a man who flew from Europe to Ghana to find out why Ghanaians answer question with questions. He got down from the flight in decided to start his search at the airport. He asked the first person at the airport while going through arrival formalities
“Excuse me sir, i need to ask you a question. I heard in Ghana, when you ask a question you are answer with a question?
This is the response of the man
“Who told you?”
Think about this for the week.
Meet you next week with serious business.