MP on a motorcycle; GMA’s opulence
Tale: In 2018, existence is so unbearable that the rich and privileged in Ghana shuttle to work on bicycles! Headline: MPs lower standards by way of driving bicycles. To “lower standards” is to descend into the gutter of the terrible or to do something so outrageously unthinkable that it's going to entice attention in “every day” communities.
At the Commonwealth corridor of the College of Ghana, whilst a Vandal lowers standards, the offense is taken into consideration so grievous that he's ponded – a death sentence. So let it be stated, and so let it be written, that during November 2018, an MP in Ghana decreased requirements by using a bicycle to paint.
In Akan and Ga, this is “musu”, an unheard-of abomination that needs to never be whispered to the various rich and privileged. In 2018, after the most effective one-time period in Parliament, Ras Mubarak considers himself so high and lifted up above the bad and wretched of the earth that using a bicycle is an indication of protest.
The implied message is that existence has become so unbearably tough in Ghana that the wealthy, unable to find the money for gas, have come right down to the negative man’s level. In France, around 1789, while told that the humans (the terrible) have been within the streets demonstrating because they had no bread, Marie-Antoinette, the wife of King Louis XVI, retorted: “Qu'ils mangent de los angeles brioche”—“let them consume cake.” That’s a lifestyle!
No, that isn't existence – at the least, no longer in nations whose residents’ taxes hold us alive. In 2009, British High Minister David Cameron’s bicycle turned into stolen. Not to be past due for Parliament, the primary alternative that came to mind turned into seizing the bus (public shipping like the Aayalolo bus) to paintings. He become spared this slower choice when his parliamentary aide (Desmond Swayne, himself an MP) offered up his very own bicycle.
And he did it due to the fact the top Minister had an urgent be counted to talk about in the August house, a rely more pressing on than his (Swayne’s). When the click sympathized with him over the lack of the bicycle, the high Minister replied: “It (his stolen bicycle) is valuable to me." In 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron, on a legit visit to Denmark, determined to tour the metropolis of Copenhagen. He rode a bicycle – observed with the aid of his host, Danish High Minister Lars Rasmussen.
Inside the Netherlands, people are used to seeing Prime Minister Mark Rutte arriving at his office for regular responsibilities on a bicycle. In 2012, he received a professional delegation from Iran at his workplace. The Iranian delegation who had arrived a touch in advance, in advance of the appointed time, had been in shock whilst the top Minister arrived at paintings on a bicycle.
Returned to Tehran, the top of the Iranian police (the IGP of Iran) who changed into the delegation, advised a local television how the Iranian delegation was ashamed after they noticed a minister of an EU country using his office on a bicycle. The Netherlands is ranked sixteenth inside the global in phrases of GDP; Ghana ranks 79th.
Were given my float, dear reader? In international locations that recognize a way to shop money so as to lend it to us in Ghana, using a bike isn't a signal of protest: it's far a way of life. In Africa, the best way to show you aren't poor is to very own an automobile, even supposing its acquisition will kill you. If Ras Mubarak’s fashion of protest gave me an event to snort (at us, Ghanaians), the opulence-mentality of the director-widespread of the Ghana Maritime Authority got me so incensed I couldn’t breathe.
Eleven air-conditioners in a 4-bedroom house, and he tells us that he is so used to the opulence that even the eleven have been too few?! What a ….! In a country wherein humans compete with livestock for water in streams and whose children sit and write on naked earth or underneath a tree that is called a classroom!
For me, however - at least, for these days - my pork is not on the wide variety of ACs, nor on the alleged GH¢a hundred thirty-five,000.00 (a hundred and thirty-5 thousand Ghana cedis – or 1000000000, 3 hundred and fifty million pre-Kufuor cedis!!!) he spent on an end-of-12 months personnel dinner party in 2017. For me, this expenditure could nevertheless be excessive even though 1,000 humans had been at the birthday party.
For those who suppose retaining the steeply-priced meetings within the CEO’s lodge is not a warfare of hobby, the question that a committee of inquiry or a courtroom of regulation will ask is, how come to the GMA suddenly found the lifestyles of that lodge simplest at some point of the tenure of the incumbent CEO? Even that one is not my pork nowadays. My fear is set this way of life of “coffee breaks” and snacks at every little assembly we maintain.
A conference or seminar or workshop that begins at 9am will ruin for snacks (coffee-tea-cocoa with croissant, kish, samosa, sandwiches, and …rolls) at 10:30am, accompanied through lunch (jollof, fried rice, meat, fish, Kelewele, with soup and bread and butter as starters) at 12:30pm and another coffee smash - (coffee-tea-cocoa with croissant, kish, samosa, sandwiches and …rolls) at 3pm.
