The missing feel-good factor
Last Saturday, a 19-year old managed to do in two hours 12 minutes and 27 seconds, what the security services and the diplomatic service of a country had been trying to do without success for more than 20 years.
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When Ghirmay Ghebreslassie, the teenager, won the first gold medal at the Athletics World Championships in Beijing, he did not only claim the first gold medal that Eritrea had ever won at an international sporting competition, but he also succeeded in bringing a completely different version of his country into the public discourse.
With the European migrant crisis dominating the news this year, Syria and Eritrea have emerged as the two countries that produce the largest number of would-be migrants.
Thanks to the civil war in Syria it is not difficult to imagine what is driving its citizens away, but it has not been that easy to work out what was going on in Eritrea.
Every boatload of desperate would-be migrants has some Eritreans on board; they have died in the crossings in the Mediterranean and they form the bulk of those in the French town of Calais trying to sneak into the United Kingdom.
It is known also that journalists have a hard time trying to do their work in Eritrea, with the local journalists often being jailed for imaginary infractions and foreign journalists finding it impossible to get working visas to report from the country.
The Advocacy group Committee to Protect Journalists says strict control over freedom of expression and thought in Eritrea and North Korea places them at the top of the list of the world's 10 most censored countries.
Compulsory national service
But the biggest push factor seems to be the compulsory national service which is supposed to last for two years but often turns out to have no limit.
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Indeed, many European countries seem to have concluded that once an asylum seeker happens to come from Eritrea, then he/she stands a good chance of having an application for refugee status accepted.
All in all, Eritrea does not feature in the good news section even when they have done well in the health sector. For example, according to the United Nations, Eritrea has met three of the Millennium Development Goals, but that hardly ever makes it into the headlines.
Under-five mortality has dropped by two-thirds, deaths in childbirth have decreased to a quarter of what they were 30 years ago and levels of HIV/AIDS and malaria have plummeted.
Unfortunately none of that comes up in any discussion about Eritrea, the reputation it has is that it is one big prison.
Enter 19-year-old Ghirmay Ghebreslassie and suddenly the whole world can see another face of Eritrea as he defeats a classy field of experienced marathon runners.
The Eritrean national anthem is played and for a few magical minutes, Eritrea is a normal country that the world can cheer.
A few minutes after the medal ceremony for the men’s marathon, the 800- metre men’s race was announced and first on the list that was splashed on the board was a certain Alex Amankwa; a name guaranteed to get my attention!
But before I could get excited, I noticed that it had the DNS legend put by the name; and DNS to the uninitiated means Did Not Start or Did Not Show.
I later found out that Alex Amankwa was one of the two Ghanaian athletes that had qualified for the competition and been refused visas.
I looked very carefully during the impressive opening ceremony and I think I saw the Ghanaian flag being paraded and I understand there is a Ghanaian delegation of officials at the competition even if there are no athletes.
Visas
I am baffled. Has Ghana really sunk so low that our athletes would be refused visas to a big competition like the world championships?
Would this be because of incompetence on the part of our officials, or because our country has such a bad reputation that the organising country would be reluctant to grant us entry visas?
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And they would grant visas to Eritreans who have been known to have wholesale defections by teams they send to competitions?
And would our officials really think it is more important to make arrangements for themselves before they think of the athletes?
Or could it be that the officials know we do not have any athletes worth sending to the competition and, therefore, did not bother?
There is a statement put out by the Ghana Athletics Association that because the association president was already in China for the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) Quadrennial Congress, he managed to get the Local Organising Committee (LOC), working with Chinese immigration and IAAF, to issue a visa-upon-arrival letter, but the airline refused to take the athletes.
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This is a country with a government whose officials complain endlessly that people refuse to see their good works and concentrate on the negative things?
It is quite true that if by some miracle a Ghanaian athlete competed and won a medal of any colour at the ongoing games, it wouldn’t halt the slide of the cedi; if six Ghanaian athletes had qualified for the games and been featured during the completion, it wouldn’t affect the price of onions at Agbogbloshie market.
It might not be considered important in our current scheme of things that we produce and present athletes.
However, we should not forget that if you cannot do small things well, it is unlikely you can do the big things.
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It is my view that it is cruel to deny us the brief and admittedly transitory joy of seeing Alex Amankwa run in the men’s 800-metre race, even if he came last. We are not Kenya and we do not expect to shine at such games but we have to accept that it is a sign of how badly we, as a country, are doing generally that we cannot find and send two athletes to compete at the World Athletics Championships.
It might well be that the the 19-year-old Eritrean would not go back home but join his many compatriots to seek asylum somewhere, but nothing can take away that moment of glory Eritrea had last Saturday.
And Ghana is in the doldrums.