Unconditional Love

She has never been the same again since their paths crossed that busy morning in the elevator. They were both headed to their various offices which were situated in the same building but on different floors and for different companies. She had to exit from the moving cubicle on the 8^th floor and did not know where her crash was headed to, on a 16 floor tower, which added to the anxiety that was building up on sighting the guy when he stepped in.

Her enthusiasm to find out who the guy was and how to nail him has just made life beautiful. It has given her something to live for apart from the busy corporate life she led. Life to her has taken a dramatic turn for good and she was going to bask in it. She was going to allow absolutely nothing, not even her negative emotions to come between her and her new object of happiness.

Jemila has been a single lady for the best part of three years even though she accepted and went on a couple of dates with men from all walks, but the farthest any of them went was a hug when they managed to drop her at home. For those who did not pass her virtual test, they never got the chance to even escort her home.  She was paying the price for bitterness from her previous relationship.

She has now by twist of fate discovered how to spend her days other than poring into her work all day and making deadlines, which is to find happiness. She began coming out of her office from time to time to monitor the elevator and sometimes frequenting the eatery on the ground floor just to bump into her new object of fascination. At home, she carried out all her chores with gaiety and some renewed energy and at night she becomes sleepless.

Even though it was only two days, it felt like years, so she changed her strategy by rearranging her office, so she could directly be watching the car park through the window blinds. That was sure to work and it did work after the sixth day which brought her self-torment to an end. 

She came earlier the next morning and waited around the car park until her Superman arrived. Even though, she thought it intrusive and falling over the cliff, she approached him, extended a hand and introduced herself.  If there was anything that worked for him about women, it was the air of confidence they exude. He took the extended hand of friendship, smiled and spoke for the first time.

“Safo is my name. I work for Gemini Consults as a lawyer. I resumed last week” he revealed and managed a coy smile as they headed towards the main building. 

They chit-chatted their way up and even managed to book a lunch date before parting to their various offices. With a beaming smile, elated Jemila pumped a fist in the air as soon as she came out of the elevator and started humming an old tune she’s never heard herself sing in a very long while. But, how could she sing a love song when she was at loggerheads with love? She swung joyously to the office, knowing that everything was alright.  

Maybe everything was not alright because anytime she was this close to her dreams, something goes wrong but she caught herself before her thoughts derailed further into negativity. “No, this is the guy of my dreams, the one I’m going to give my unconditional love to and I am going to do everything to have him. Period” as she settled in to contribute her day’s quota.

Before long, it was lunch-break and everything came to pass as she envisaged. Lunch with the perfect gentleman also turned out to be the first time she was seen in the company of a man at the canteen.

Love is a good thing.

Their first date turned out well which warranted another one in the evening. It was Tea or Ice cream and a movie afterwards, to be decided two hours before the date. And while Safo was taking everything easy and considering Jemila, a very good distraction from his marriage which was on the verge of collapse, Jemila was on cloud nine waiting to climb higher. 

Well, she is on the threshold now.

Whereas Safo was talking to her wife’s lawyer and some family members from both divides all afternoon to save his marriage, Jemila was busy picking out clothes from her wardrobe in her mind’s eye. She changed into several clothes, applied assorted lipsticks and ear rings to match, until she got the perfect dress and accessories for the night. She was also scripting in her mind how she was going to break the news without sounding unnecessarily desperate.

What if she was desperate? Well, she couldn’t come home tonight without telling him somehow, lest she will explode into tiny fragments and that would be the end of her existence. What happened to the old motivational, “go for what you want”?

Time waits for no man and they were already seated across each other, giggling and licking Ice creams from their beech sticks like school kids in the ambience of the new plush Ice cream joint in Town. As far as expectations were concerned, the night was turning out well for Jemila, so she thought the timing was right to spill the beans.

“I hate to push my luck but I would like to state that, it’s nice being friends with you. I can’t believe we are already having good times like some old friends. I feel at home already and wouldn’t mind having a repeated dose of this every time” she broke the ice.

“How do you mean”, he enquired firmly

“Please, I have never been good with words and hope you understand me” she explained further

“That will be a little difficult since I don’t know what you talking about”

“I love you” she declared and waited for some time to pass and continued

“It’s unconditional and I knew it the very first time we met. I would have waited for your feelings for me to mature, but I’m sure I couldn’t have made it through this night without letting you know”

Safo just smiled, shifted his chair back, beckoned to an attendant within sight and adjusted well, so he could reach out for his wallet at the back of his pants to pay the bill.

“Jemila, its nice knowing you and I think you are and will be a nice company but no one can love anyone unconditionally, not even God. We all love with conditions attached and I refuse to continue this meeting. Good evening” 

Touché!

Jemila just sat there dumbfounded and could not come to terms, but one thing was clear as she sat in the shades the lights threw at her and that was at least she could love again. Yes, she will love again only this time, it will be conditional.

Big Brother is Fake!

Big brother is supposed to be a reality show, staged in a large comfortable house, furnished with Jacuzzi, Steam bath, large furniture, running water, enough food, alcohol, VIP suite, other luxuries and lots of surveillance cameras to monitor every single movement made by the housemates. Currently ranked as the number one ‘reality show’ in Africa, Big Brother is premised on a group of people who have been handpicked from various African Countries after series of auditions, to mingle and foster relationships in a house where they are isolated and barred from having any interaction whatsoever with the outside world.

The show which runs for almost three months features mostly housemates who are upbeat about fame and how to make it in life by scheming all kind of strategies and plots to outwit each other for the grand prize. Whilst the real objective of the reality show is yet to be known, speculation holds that, it serves as a platform to watch people closely through the lenses of Big Brother’s all-seeing-eye as housemates live their lives.

Apart from the fact that it is a game and sometimes entertaining, most people are wondering what’s in for them since all the fun starts and ends there in the marooned house. Undisputedly, the game if played well, presents a platform for some of the housemates to sell their brands in all African homes and abroad, whiles, some are about finding love by taking their chances. Others are about the fame while some are purposely there for the grand prize which reminds us of choices and preferences.

However, my motivation to write this piece is to dispute the fact that BIG BROTHER is a reality show because whereas the ‘show’ holds true, same cannot be said about the ‘reality’. You don’t congregate a bunch of young men and women in a house and dictate how they should live by telling them what they should do at appreciable time intervals and still call it reality.

Big Brother practically tells them what to wear, where to go and sometimes, what to eat. It tells them when to engage in a task or bath whilst showing their nudity to anyone who cares to watch and I don’t see how these constitute being real with one’s self. 

Reality show is what you see when you enter Makola and Ikeja markets in Ghana and Nigeria respectively. It is what you see when you observe from the corner of the road and see people struggling and shoving each other just to board vehicles that will convey them to their places of work while the snake of private cars honk all through the traffic jam to work.

Reality is waking up in the morning and planning what to do or how to add value to one’s self, not just gossip, chit-chat about everything and anything or saunter around a demarcated perimeter to which anything contrary attracts a stroke and probably sends you packing home. 

I understand people are really living very luxurious lives where they just relax at home and watch the globe turn around without a tinge of a worry about how to feed, but it is different when you camp a group of people with an objective, by feeding, clothing and offering them almost anything basic a person requires to live a healthy and a clean life should at most be a ‘live show’ but not a reality show because we watch live football matches every time but do not refer to them as reality shows.

Ghana Prisons; An asset or a liability?

If you have ever used a phone with an annoying ring tone, then you would have known by now that, the most prudent thing to do under such circumstances is to usually alter the settings to vibration mode or in worst cases, put it on silence, which relieves us and everybody on our timeline, the cacophony of an aching siren which is mistaken as a tone. But do we loathe ourselves should the phone be misplaced afterwards?

The first thing we do when we misplace our phone is to reach out for an alternative phone to call the missing one, just so we can be directed to where the ringing is emanating from, and should your ring tone be set to ‘off’ or to its lowest decibels at the time of missing, then your guess is as good as mine and it is this line of thought where we take actions without recourse to what can happen in the future is what has motivated me to research into the Prison system here in Ghana so that should I find myself being gaoled by any twist of fate, I can find solace in the fact that, I didn’t lower the level of my ring tone.

Prison according to Wikipedia is a place in which people are physically confined and usually deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Other terms the Prison is referred to as is penitentiary also known as pen, correctional facility, remand centre, detention center, jail or gaol and many more as would be discussed in this write-up.

It is however worthy to note that there was a traditional system which saw to it that wrong doers were either banished or ‘cleansed’ by performing rituals and reinstated into society prior to the introduction of the Prisons Systems. The Prison system which abolished the former way of punishing and rehabilitating deviants in society was thus established to give safe custody to Prisoners, ensuring their welfare by protecting their rights to good health, clothing, bedding among other basic requirements and lastly, reforming and rehabilitating them by offering them opportunities to develop a set of skills through trade, training and moral education but the multi-million dollar question which begs to be asked is, are these functions for which these Prisons were built  being  met?

A Prison among other things should have a religious facility, educational facility such as a library, a gym or a place to exercise, a healthcare facility to offer medical care, psychiatric services, dental and a recreational facility which may contain at least a TV and I want to know how far we have gone to address all these requirements as a nation and if not, then what is government doing about it? 

There are currently 45 Prison establishments scattered all over the country with varying levels security such as the closed and open security systems for those who have passed their ‘FLED’ (Full license eligibility date) or those given the ROTL (release on temporary license) to visit home from time to time which is usually a quarter of the way through the Prison sentence but our security system is still nothing to write home about.

Do we have motion sensors to check the wrongful movements of inmates? What about sniffer dogs and roving patrols that will ensure that no stone is left unturned against those who are likely to break jail? What about defensible main gates and armed guard towers where movement from a distance can be monitored?

The Prison system as an extension of the Ministry of Justice aims at punishing and rehabilitating criminals as defined by the law but you realize that the Prison service is mostly interested in only the retributive aspect of their mandate. This is because most of the inmates come out worse than they went inside and you are tempted to ask if they are actually trained to master their acts that sent them there in the first place. 

A Prison system requires that an officer be made responsible for the welfare and supervision of three Prisoners but the ratio in Ghana has risen above six criminals to one officer and counting. Even though the Prison service has been understaffed for a very long time, it is laudable to note that, the quality in the personnel has improved over the years due to the qualification of new recruits.

The Prison service in its effort to upgrade structures to meet the ever demanding and increasing number of criminals however has institutional bottlenecks that continually make lack of funds persistent. They are not granted the right amount of money needed to upgrade facilities which is an indictment to the powers that be and this goes a long way to make the living conditions of the inmates palpable and gross.

Inmates are allowed to sleep, urinate, eat and attend to nature’s calls in their cells and this is an infringement on their rights because they are a part of society and should not be treated inhumanely, not to talk about the diseases they can contract living under such circumstances.

The Prison service in its effort as part of restructuring the rehabilitation and to give a sense of dignity to the inmates has proposed to change their name from Ghana Prisons service to Ghana correctional service since the year 2007, but is yet to be approved by an act of parliament which would in tend give the law a force. As to why the bill is yet to be promulgated into a law after six years and counting is another area we will look at some other time.

Our system has no ‘deferred sentence’ where for one reason or the other, one’s sentence can be deferred until they are ready to serve their terms. Examples can be given of pregnant women who are sentenced to jail terms and allowed to deliver and cater for their new born babies with the scanty resources that are provided to the inmates. Ill-health is also another reason why deferred sentences has to be introduced into our penal system so that inmates can be given special treatments at home until they are fit again to continue serving their terms.

Currently, there are about 14,000 inmates who are sharing resources meant for about 8000 inmates and you can tell that, the situation is purely a matter of the fittest surviving against all odds. Most people are not supposed to be there in the first place and this behooves the justice system to expedite trials on remand Prisoners who in some instances would be acquitted and discharged or imprisoned to ease the pressure off the resources and to also mitigate wrongful punishment of people because justice delayed is justice denied.

Apparently, most of these remand Prisoners mostly are there because they have not been able to afford a lawyer and that is bad. The government has to furnish these people with lawyers on pro bono basis to see to it that justice is dispensed timely, which can go a long way to boost the capacity of the justice system and to help people build confidence in the system.

We can also reduce the number of these remand Prisoners by sentencing them to undertaking community services. The government can make use of these deviants by putting them to work in their communities to help clean the communities or help contribute their quota to the community by doing diligently what they have been tasked to do and this can also go a long way to serve as a deterrent to others, because the idea of the justice system is not necessarily to be retributive but to help people change and become good citizens.

Ghana happens to be one of the destinations that still make use of archaic Prison infrastructures dating as far back as four hundred years e.g. James fort, which was built for only 200 people but now houses about 740 inmates per the data available as at the time of reviewing the available literature.

There are no proper transport systems to convey inmates to and from the field where they sometimes work. Exposing and leaving these inmates on their own can be dangerous to the Prison Guards and society at large, because some hardly reform, as they keep plotting their vengeance, especially, those who were wrongfully incarcerated.

There is no gainsaying that the food given to the inmates is of bad quality and mal-nutritional, but it is probably because, government is not giving them much. Alternatively, i do not think the tax payer’s money should be channeled into feeding Prisoners. Most of these Prisoners could be made to work and keep large acres of farm lands, especially those who are sentenced with hard labor. The state cannot be at their brunt while they were free and still spend its money on them while incarcerated and proper management of this situation can even give the nation a surplus from their produce.

Sadly, most of these inmates only come back into society as hardened criminals because there are no

adequate training and education for them. Recidivism; the act of relapsing into criminal activities, abounds in our society because there are no workshops to train these inmates and where there are, they are not operational and no one seems to care because the crime or neglect being perpetrated is not directly on our doorsteps.

Most of these deviants sifted from the public domain and named as Prisoners ended there in the first place through no fault of theirs but through system failure. A system that sentences an unemployed young man for uprooting a neighbor’s cassava without his consent and tries an employed civil servant forever for embezzling public funds meant for the collective growth of everyone is certainly a failed system. 

These Prisoners must be helped to regain their sense of worth and self-esteem to be able to be re-integrated into society without problem. It will be a step in the right direction if social and civil organizations can come out to help the government to tackle the problems and solutions herein by donating and sponsoring some of the things needed to fully rehabilitate the system and it’s dependents in a bid to making this place a better place for all of us.

Ghana: gateway to Africa?

Even though, New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC) are in court as respective petitioners and respondents in the just-ended Presidential and Parliamentary elections which was held on the 7^th of December, 2012, it is convenient to say that, the whole of Ghana is in Court, since our multi-party system basically revolves around these two main political parties and any result thereof from the suit will be binding on the whole nation.

Evidently, many Ghanaians are not enthused about the school of thought that seems to suggest that, the lawsuit is or will deepen democracy while primary concerns are left unattended to. Democracy has since stopped making sense to the people because they are hungry and by extension, angry.

The law suit that seeks to annul results from various polling stations across the nation to either instate the flag bearer of the biggest opposition party or re-run the elections is yet another failure from our leaders. 

They have failed abysmally because this is not what we bargained for when we set out to vote for leaders across board. The good people of Ghana whose consciences were pleaded to before the voting, were also not told that, nine judges, and I mean only nine people would decide the fate of who our President should be after abandoning everything and queuing in the hot sun to vote as part of their civil rights.

This lawsuit is not about the people, neither is it about democracy. it is about all the stakeholders who represents in court every day. It is about those who stand to lose or win in the suit and I can give you myriads of reasons why I think the lawsuit is not about you in the first place. 

If the lawsuit was about you, I will bet my last pesewa that, you would have represented at least once or twice in court to follow proceedings, because televising it alone, is not enough for a prime stakeholder who has to monitor proceedings. It is also not about you, because, this lawsuit is running on cost which could have been re-distributed or channeled into other sectors that can help the trivial many, regardless of whether the money belonged to an individual or the nation.

I have not been anywhere outside the borders of Ghana but I laugh at the “Ghana is the gateway to Africa” mantra and sometimes it even makes me sad to think of the other African Countries to which we are a gateway to. Admittedly, if Ghana is a gateway to Africa, then the other countries must be a sad sight to behold by all and sundry and it also makes me wonder how we came by this accolade.

Ideally, Ghana may be the gateway to Africa if it could tap into all the resources it has been endowed with and managed well for the benefit of the people who matter most, but I don’t see how going about with cap in hand to finance payments of judgement debts and lawsuits, misappropriation and embezzlement could amount to Ghana being the gate-keepers of the African continent.

Ghana is bedeviled with constant light-offs that have been christened ‘dumsor, dumsor”, lack of potable water, razing down of public institutions or markets twice or thrice in an average of six months to which causes are not found, let alone the perpetrators. People can hardly feed thrice a day and access to good schools is just elusive and all our politicians do, is to pay lip service by stashing everything into their proverbial pipeline and Ghana is still touted as the “gateway to Africa”?  Then, Africa as a continent must be joking to say the least.

Money certainly is not plucked from trees, which would have made it quite impossible for relatively short people to pluck, but rather placed beneath our feet, to make it possible for even a child to reach out to. God in his infinite wisdom deposited money in the form of various minerals such as bauxite, diamond, gold and recently, oil beneath our feet, so it can be triumphed upon and made to amount to nothing, but unfortunately, it is what matters most. 

Nonetheless, our Politicians have made it very possible that the money beneath our feet does not make it into our hands. Life is so difficult for the very heartbeat of our society; the masses who invariably are the builders of the economy, guided by the few elites few who are mere facilitators. And to add insult to injury, most of these workers are either not paid at all or not paid on time which necessitates the cyclic strike actions that have engulfed our nation from various sectors of the working class. Infact, money has become the most scarce commodity man has ever known in this 21^st century of ours.

Our big men have successfully taken over from where the white man left off. In the past, we were exploited of our mineral reserves and anything that matters to the growth and progress of the nation, but fast forwarded to now, our own kinsmen steal from the masses only to deposit in other countries for themselves and their families while communities down here lacks basic amenities such as toilet, parks, hospitals and potable water.

Our leaders have even made it more difficult for the people by deducting their cuts (kickbacks) from the hard earned grants and aids they go begging on behalf of the people. Everyone who takes part in the transaction, a mandate they get paid for, still ensures, he received what was due him until there is none left for the building of basic amenities and public institutions, such as, markets, hospitals, parks, toilets and connecting potable water to the people for which these monies were granted in the first place and you call this democracy?

Which democracy are we deepening by even channeling man-hours into the court room to litigate on matters that will not enrich anybody or is it the democracy that allows everyone with a phone to call into radio programmes and insult anyone they like? 

Ghana is blessed beyond reasonable doubts with regards to what ensues in other nations but our leaders are mismanaging the economy, taking us for granted and not driving us out of the doldrums of poverty but rather making it difficult for us as a nation, by incurring debts for generations to come through their incessant borrowing to which they hardly put to good use. 

Conclusively, to live up to the “Ghana is the gateway to Africa” mantra, we, the cheerleaders must boo at those who are wrongly steering the affairs of the nation and also help in our own small ways by discerning and not following them down the blind alleys. We also have to move away from party politics and have a renewed mind towards nation building and that is the only time, deepening our democracy won’t be a mirage but a reality.