Mahama’s paradise: Reflections on the State of the Nation Address
Listening to President Mahama deliver the 2014 State of the Nation address was like listening to a soundtrack of Old Major’s speech in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (one stanza of which is quoted below). It was an oral painting of a paradise.
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“Riches more than mind can picture; Wheat and barley, oats and hay; Clover, beans and mangel-wurzels, Shall be ours upon that day... Bright will shine the fields of England; Purer shall its waters be; Sweeter yet shall blow its breezes; On the day that sets us free.”
Only a fool would have kept himself/herself from what that speech produced: A coup d’etat that toppled the human kingdom to establish the ideal, the utopia that came to be known as Animal Farm.
Did you ever see that little booklet containing Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah’s Seven-Year Development Plan? Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom made a copy available to me (as Editor of the Ghanaian Times) during the centenary celebration of the great man’s birth.
That was vision reduced to the language of the ordinary man. He even had this glorious future rendered in drawings and pictures. Here was a man who was used to carrying the people with him.
Mahama’s got it – I mean, the ability to articulate a vision. He only needs a year or two to learn that a President doesn’t tell MPs to “keep quiet and listen” or glorify the reprehensible, inexcusable gaffe of an authoritarian MCE who evidently thinks that politics and positions place appointees above lesser beings or mere mortals.
What a State of the Nation presentation! I fell so helplessly in love with the style of rendition that I forgot completely, albeit temporarily, that my electricity bill was now thrice what it used to be six months ago.
But the President was presenting a hope for the future. So for now, though his diagnoses of the economy sounded like a broken pin stuck in the groove (because “we’ve heard it all before” - as Ghanaian cynics would put it), I was - and still am - prepared to wait till the next State of the Nation Address.
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What we hadn’t heard before was the President’s references to Mr Magnus Nunoo, the sachet water man, and Mr Senaya, the shoe maker. For a moment I thought I was listening to Albert Ocran’s profiling of successful achievers on Joy FM’s Sunday night Springboard programme.
In terms of what this portion of the address stands to do to local industry, we can’t begin to imagine. It was a throwback to an antecedent when a President of Ghana, not too many years ago, urged a whole nation to boycott products from “Akoko Darko” and Apino Soap, merely because the two personalities behind the products had once been his political opponents!
If today, India is noted worldwide for its silk, which has also become a major foreign exchange earner, it is because its leader then, Mohandas (or Mahatma) Gandhi, promoted what became known as “The Khadi Movement”, an ideology that Indians could be self-reliant on hemp and free from the high-priced goods and clothes which the British were selling to them.
The British would buy cotton from India at cheap prices and export it to Britain where they were woven to make clothes. These clothes were then brought back to India to be sold at hefty prices. Mahatma Gandhi began promoting the spinning of khadiī for rural self-employment and self-reliance (instead of using cloth manufactured industrially in Britain)
As a nation, we need to be doing more of this – telling the success stories of our industrialists and achievers - from the level of the presidency.
One name the President forgot to mention was Dr Paa Kwesi Nduom, or specifically, the hotels belonging to the Group Nduom stable. At these hotels, e.g. the Accra Coconut Grove Regency Hotel, every grain of rice in those delicious mouth-watering gastronomic delights placed before you is grown in Ghana.
Talk about perfumed rice. Did anybody know that there is grown-in-Ghana perfumed rice? In the Ghanaian perfumed rice, the perfume is not an additive, or artificially fragranced. It grows naturally. Yes, here in Ghana! Check with the Ghanaian rice growers. Ask for a Mr Mends.
Talking about local industry, the President could go further. I urge that with effect from today, he includes in all his after-dinner addresses at state banquets that: “Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, every ingredient, every condiment in all the dishes you’ve eaten this morning (or this afternoon or tonight), is Ghanaian”. As they do at all these buffet dinners, the names of the dishes should be boldly provided, for the TV cameras to zoom on, to be magnified on our screens.
Just in case the presidency has a shortage of chefs or nutritionists knowledgeable in which Ghanaian dishes are appropriate for breakfast, lunch or supper, there is a woman who has a restaurant at the National Theatre. Her name is Bella Ahu. She is the best.
Wines? Liqueurs? Why? there is palm wine! There is Takai! If Mr President is afraid of palm wine, just ask Kwaw Ansah. At a party he threw in honour of the then Indian High Commissioner to Ghana just after the release of his classic, Love Brewed in the African Pot, the Ghanaian big men present had ignored the presence of palm wine, ‘ahey’ and ‘tuei’ until the German and another western diplomat (forgotten which country he represented) arrived an hour later.
After being introduced to the various drinks available, the German Ambassador went for the palm wine. He was joined by the other diplomat. It was after this that the Ghanaian big men started strolling towards the palm wine corner! Before the foreign diplomats arrived, there was one foreign affairs gentleman who had been at pains to point out and warn that: “these drinks do not sit well on the stomachs of the whites.” I narrate this to assure Mr President that some of his foreign guests may not be the faint-hearted type.
To return to the body of the State of the Nation Address, I make reference to the “Free SHS” . I do so only to lament what the President is quoted as saying in the Central Region a few days later – that no one owned a copyright to the Free SHS policy.
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It’s true that the Registrar-General has no such records. It’s also true that it is a constitutional provision. In his sober moments away from the partisan crowd, however, Mr President would agree with me that that type of language belongs to the soap box. It is not the type of language for a President who is extending an arm of co-operation to brains in the other political parties to: “Come, let’s work together”.
The ‘hawks’ in his party may tell him a different story, but from the little I have seen of him, so far, Mr Mahama stands a gloriously good chance of attaining what this country needs at the moment – a President who is a father-figure, not a political figure.
A few days after the Free SHS announcement, here comes a lamentation from the research community. According to Dr George Essegbey, Director of Science and Technology Policy Research Institute (STEPRI), “government pays the salaries of research scientists but does not contribute to research because of other priorities.
He said the country’s research funds had dried up because it had stopped receiving funding from the government FOR THE PAST TEN YEARS”...“that currently research activities were being funded by international donors and partners; an initiative which could be borne by government” (Ghanaian Times, Saturday, March 1, 2014).
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Ten years!? No wonder that Ghana is filled with traders!!
We cannot wait for the National Research Fund.