Abongo Financial Management. Critical News, 12th April 2015

Sydney Casely-Hayford, sydney@bizghana.com

Don’t do as I did last Wednesday. Mad persons were greeting me on the sidewalk of Accra, because they identified me as a possible compatriot.

I am walking from one end of circle to the South Industrial area. Traffic is jammed and I am late to a meeting. Going in the opposite direction from Bus Stop heading towards New Times junction, I was in a taxi and were it not that the conversation was interesting because the driver saw himself an Occupier and recognized, my alter ego would have me on time at the meeting.

Basking in the glory of hearing an “ordinary” Ghanaian loading praises on Occupy Ghana, I had to make an emergency drop off to catch an Okada, because the supposed professionals manning the construction of the Nkrumah Circle overhead, had not allowed for the pedestrian overflow and we have ended up endangering the lives of the walking Ghanaian every time you use a footpath in the middle of the road.

So now I am on the back of an Okada, chasing time on a rainy day in Accra, heading to one of the worst roads in the city where fake repairers modify and doctor engine parts just to get facades of success. Of course the Okada is going against oncoming vehicles and I am as nervous as I could be since I stopped riding motorbikes forty something years ago.

As if to fibrillate my heart from the sedative of the taxi, my immediate lord of my few years of life – which I have dedicated to fixing some governance issues in Ghana – is taking risks my sixty-year-old heart is not finding easy to manage.

Now we are going through unfathomable trenches of water, mud laden and opaque to the point of fear of falling off the bike. I fake my destination and get off the Okada, only to hear the young rider ask if I am Sydney. But yes! How does he know me? His English is laden with good diction and I am impressed enough to ask how?

Feces-Clogged Shore Shows Africa Infrastructure Failings

By Pauline Bax

A garbage collection bicycle sits with the slogan “Keep Ghana clean” by an open sewer river. The World Bank will give Ghana $150 million in grants to improve access to potable water and basic toilets for the poorest residents of Accra, where most roads are lined with open drains and gutters that overflow during heavy rains.

Fredrik Sunesson had high hopes when the first tanker truck unloaded feces from some of Accra’s 4 million residents at his recycling plant in Ghana’s capital. Seventeen months later, those expectations have been dashed.

A combination of red tape and disputes over payments mean Sunesson’s Slamson Ghana Ltd. is running far below capacity, he says. Most of the 140 tankers dump the contents of Accra’s toilets each day into the Gulf of Guinea at a foul-smelling dune known as Lavender Hill. The lagoon nearby is so polluted that scientists says most life-forms can’t survive. The slum nearby has earned the nickname Sodom and Gomorrah.

“It’s a shame for everybody, most of all for the environment and the people of Accra,” Sunesson said.

A Load of Rain. Critical News, 20th May 2012

Sydney Casely-Hayford, Sydney@bizghana.com

We had a rainstorm this past Saturday.  Normal for Kumasi, but a real tropical howler in Accra.

I was somewhere in the Central Business District (CBD) as we call it and I did not feel most of the storm until much later in the afternoon.  When I did get into it, the first event that caught me was a dislodged brick from the top of the Ghana House Building (which is where I was) landed on the back windshield of a red Toyota saloon car and shattered it completely.  It was raging like crazy.

SMEs Appeal For Removal of Hurdles to Access Bank Loans

By Carly Ahiable, Business in Ghana

Owners of small businesses in Accra have appealed to commercial banks to ease their rigid conditionality for loans to make it possible for more small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to access funds to develop their business.

The made the appeal during questions and answers time at the second day of a two-day business focused seminar dubbed “Nkontabuo Krakye” seminar developed to get SMEs operators to master and manage their businesses to improve profitability.

The “Nkontabuo Krakye” is carved out of a weekly business programme on an Accra radio station, the Asempa FM that educates SME practitioners on proper business management and record keeping.

Pondering Africans’ beginnings for advancement

By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong

The Accra Sports Stadium was re-named Ohene Djan Stadium by the former ruling National Patriotic Party (NPP) in 2004. Then the Ohene Djan Stadium was re-named again as Accra Sports Stadium by the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) September, 2010.

The first naming was innocently nationalistic, the second on purely ethnic feelings. This has set off an irate debate that had larger implications than AMA had thought of. This is expected, considering the manner African nation-states were created some 50 years ago. The controversy has also opened the debate about where the entire Ghanaian, and for that matter African, ethnic groups came from to their present abode. AMA’s argument has raised insightful public talks for Ghanaians and other Africans. Prof. Jacob Ade Ajayi, the eminent Nigerian historian and editor of General History of Africa (1989), who has done a lot work in this context, will be of help as a clarifier.

The Business of Faith

The Church business is probably the fastest-growing business in Ghana today.

All over Accra, huge church buildings are going up to serve as homes to growing churches and to bear silent witness to how much money preachers can summon from our suffering masses. Today, as in the days gone by, our religious leaders have a lot of sway in our lives.

To illustrate this, let me remind you of something that happened in an Accra court last week. According to a Ghana News Agency report, one Boatema had been involved in a business transaction that had led to accusations of her pocketing, or in her case, tying some other peoples’ money at the end of her “ntoma”. According to the GNA, “When the case was called, Boatema resurfaced but could hardly walk. Pastor Ovia who accompanied her to court said Boatema was receiving prayers and treatment at his church…”.

Arthur Kobina Kennedy

Barack Obama and African mindset

s various editorialists and commentators throughout Africa have analyzed the substance of US President Barack Obama’s Accra policy statement on Africa on July 12 wasn’t new. What was new was Obama’s metaphysics, the bold unto-your-face manner, the ambience, the level of confidence, the psychological import, and the attempts to hit home a new mindset for Africa’s development.

That one of the key stumbling blocks of Africa’s progress is its mindset is unarguable. And Obama set to knock off the self-immolation, inferiority complex and finger-pointing. To let Africa face its problems head-on Obama didn’t promise huge monies as George Bush and Bill Clinton had done earlier. Obama has thorough grasp of the African situation (his father being victim) and he played brutally into it unemotionally, using his own refinement against all odds that saw him become the first African-American president of the United States.

Kofi Akosah Sarpong

Drowning in Filth

My seven year-old son gave the idea for this column two weeks ago. We were driving round Accra when he suddenly asked, with an edge to his voice “Why is Ghana so full of garbage?”  As I pondered his question, through the car window, I could see so many well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, picking their way through and round piles of garbage, to board tro-tros, taxis and buses on their way to and from places. Garbage, human excreta, stench—– these are problems that should engage the attention of all serious Ghanaians. These problems are apolitical. They defy ethnicity.  I am sure that over the last 24 hours, nearly everyone who is healthy has pissed and/or pooped and generated some garbage. It is a problem whose depth and breadth defies political sloganeering.

By Arthur Kobina Kennedy