I am back

There are so many graduate on the job market looking for jobs today but i guess the claim is that there are no job. Or just maybe people are reserving the jobs for their relations or to get into innocent girls' panties.

What really get to me today in Ghana is the so-called job agencies and the so-called career development training programmes organised by consults or something of that sort. The idea does not disgust me so much as to the huge sums of money they take from job seekers before they help them find jobs or train them for the job market.

First of all if there is so much need for those trainings they seem to purport to offer, i think that the various universities and polytechnics should be closed down because they are a waste of peoples' time and money and not giving them the training they need for the job market.

If a person has those huge sums of money demanded for these training and placement programmes, why will they bother to look for work in the first place. I wouldn't! i might as well start my own thing!

It brings me to my big worry all the time. Ghanaians can copy but do not know how to copy to benefit us. We take everything we see in its totality and try to force it down on ourselves.

No wonder a former president of this nation went for a loan to buy snow ploughers.

I hope I didn't start on too high a note.

Let see what comes next.

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.

AM I MAD?????????

I am very sure i will make a few more enemies by the end of this publication but who cares, we always have enemies no matter what we do. I am sure by now you know my disgust for preachers and pastors already. Don’t make a mistake, I am a Christian, you can call me so or lets me be more precise, a church goer. I go to church, I believe in God. I am a catholic. I will however want to put things the way I understand them in the bible when I read than how someone who calls himself a preacher will put it.

Let us analyse this issue objectively then and afterwards you can judge me if you want. In my understanding after the death and resurrection of Christ, His disciples did everything together. It is said that they held everything they had and earned in a common treasury so that they could all benefit from it. I also believed that in the Old Testament when the people of Israel gave a 10th of everything they own to the Lord through thanksgiving offerings and tithes, those burnt as sacrifice were burnt and the rest was used for the common good of the people. My believe comes from the fact that in the story of Moses and the plague in Egypt, when the lamb was killed and the blood was used to mark the doorpost, the people fed on the meat.

Enough of my bullshit, right? So why is it that pastors and preachers take tithes and collection and again ask for welfare collections? This is really senseless to me. What in God’s name do they use the money from the collection and tithes for? You should just take off you religious sentiments and do an objective analyse of this and tell me if I am crazy of not. I won’t mind if you think I am really crazy.

I heard a pastor appeal to the local authorities of a town to put up street lights on the street behind the walls of the church after an unfortunate incidence took place there. Mind you, it was happening before but because it did not affect a love one, he did not see the need to take action.

I can tell you for a fact that the church he runs has so much money that if that which he appeals to local authorities is done by the church which he leads, it will not affect a 100th of the churches budget. You see the Ghanaian attitude I talked about is working again.

“What is the government do about…….”

I appreciate the efforts of some pastors and preachers, this one I just referred to is one of them who do well to help society but I will say that appeal in the church was just out of place. Most preachers use the bible to instil fear in their follower and to intimidate them. I remember one phrase I use to here a lot being used by preachers, “touch not my anointed and do my prophets no harm” which the quote from the bible it is still used these days but at a reduced level.

I say let pastor accept that they are humans just like all of us who either believe or don’t believe in God. Let them stop putting the name of God into contempt. I heard a radio ad that a pastor had prayed over “anointing oil” and was selling it. The ad claimed it could cure infertility and other sickness as well as heal and deliver people from torment of evil spirits and curses.

I am I blind or I just read in the bible “freely ye receive, freely ye shall give”. If what the ad claimed was true, what happened to the phrase I just quoted? Now I think I am mad because I see things differently from the rest of the Christians. Did you hear of the New Vision party? It is led by a pastor who upon been acclaimed the presidential candidate of the part said

“……. Our leaders don’t have the vision of God ………. for lack of vision my people perish”.

I just said to myself indeed. For lack of wisdom my nation Ghana is perishing. For goodness sake, Could we make a policy that without at least some post secondary education in government, public administration, political science or public law, one could not contest in parliamentary and presidential elections?

May be I am wrong on this suggestion but I believe it will take the “IGNORAMUS” from politics and save us some unwanted bombardment. I think the pastor should be made to quit the office of the church as a pastor to become a politician. If public servants have to, why shouldn’t the pastor?

Preachers make themselves more knowledgeable than they actually are. They say what they think and when you challenge them, they claim it is a vision from God and bet you, you can’t challenge that.

A male preacher once said that when called him, he heard a voice say “(his name)… my daughter”. His colleague pastor who was there then corrected him and told him it was “son” and not daughter. He shouted back at him saying “were you there”.

Believe you me, his church was always full. You will me educated intellectuals in there listening to this self acclaimed pastor say anything to get money from their unsuspecting victims or let me say religiously blinded victims. Ok I don’t know of his where about now.

The church is doing so much service to the nation. True! But there is more to be done. Let me take on my church. The Catholic Church has a lot of school and hospitals in Ghana doing the nation so much service. Congrats. On a Sunday, we give a second offering for catholic university. At least once a year, yet the fee at the university is 1000 USD per semester. How many average Ghanaian and poor Ghanaians can afford this?

Another thing I observed in my church is that we always see the poor to be somewhere else, in a village or somewhere else but in the parish itself. My parish does a lot of charity to other places but I can tell you there are more charity cases in the parish than outside it. This is our predicament. I am not saying the church is doing terribly but I am saying we are dodging our responsibilities. Charity they say begins at home.

These are but a few of the reasons that I do not personal like preacher though most of my friend are preacher. I don’t hate them but I disagree with them on a lot of things they do. did you know that there is a catholic church in Ghana with split air-conditioning in the church auditorium? Whose money went into that?

Let’s leave the rest for later. I don’t want you to hate preachers. I just want you to take a closer look at them. Put them on their toes. Let them know that actually they are touchable and accountable to the people who actually give the money for the work of God.

Like the Americans will say
“In God we trust”.

GHANA@51

I usually type what I want to say before I post them but today, I am sitting behind a computer bored as booooooored and I am typing nothing at all like I always do. I just want to make a few pointers to my few readers.

You that among other things when a person goes to school, he or she learns about how to live a meaningful life. A meaningful life to benefit the person and society as a whole. Unfortunately for our case it isn't so in Ghana. You go to school so that politicians can look good in the eyes of the international donor and aid agencies.

I remember when a friend complained that it was too expensive to get a university education. You won't believe what I told him being an academic freak, I said;

"oh, when you complete your education, you will get a job to make up for all the investments you made into your education".

I am glad he doesn't remember what I said that day. He will be sueing me for misleading him. Unfortunately your university degree doesn't earn you a job these days. It gets you indebted if you took a students loan and it makes you a nuisance to your family who see you as a burden for them since you can't get a job.

Supposing as a compensation, you get to see what you learnt in school being implemented, you could say to yourself;

"atleast i knew that and i learnt it from school".

Unfortunately that is not to be. The law is the crime and the law enforcer the criminal instead of the law and law enforcer apprehending criminals.

Our politicians lack Will Power, our public servants lack the motivation and the citizenry lack the desire to do right.

A politician will only do right if it favours his/her political ambition.

A public servant/civil servant will do right when he gets "motivation" (bribe).

For us the citizenry, we do not have the desire to do right or demand right because we don't know what is right anyway.

The public/civil servant will not teach you because it will mean not getting his or her motivation(bribe) after doing what he or she is being paid to do. The politician is glad you do not know because by not knowing you cannot demand that he does what is right and so he gets to do what is wrong or what will favour his/her political ambition.

The nigerian will say;

"na who cause am?"

So it happened that a journalist doing a study on corruption in the world over decides to interview ministers from Europe and Africa to know the levels of corruption. He studies the two ministers' asset before the get into office and during their term of office. These are the responses from the two interviews.

NOTES:

J : Journalist

E.M: European Minister

A.M: African Minister

J: I realised that before assuming office you had one car and a house and just after 1 year you have three cars and three houses?

E.M: You this project on the school, I had 10%, you see the hospital project, another 10%, the bridge over the river 10%. That is how come I have all that I have.

The same question is posed to the African minister and this is his response;

A.M: You see that school project, 90%, you see the hospital project, 80%, you see the bridge over the river outside.....

J: but there is no bridge there!

A.M: Exactly! 100%

J: Why?

A.M: because they don't know, they can't demand.

it is not over yet, there is room for improvement and growth in Ghana and Africa!