Accra offers a clear contrast to Lagos. Politics is in the air. Giant bill boards touting one presidential candidate after another dot the landscape. There are fewer churches than in Lagos. But Accra would soon catch up, it seems. The humongous Pure Fire Ministry on Kisima Road tells me so. A taxi-driver told me its founder is Nigerian. Could the founder have come from any place other than the country that birthed the Mountain of Fire Ministry. Rejoice not Kwaku, watch out Kwasi, for your Accra might soon become like my Lagos.
Considering things from the outside, Accra’s bourgeoisie looks better organized than their Lagos counterparts with whom, I am told, they hold superlative parties frequently on the weekends. (Virgin Nigeria airline promises in its advertisements to put together in one bed the classes that fly in both countries. Love blooms within the West African bourgeoisie, courtesy of Charles Branson’s flying vessels and GSM telephony brought to us by UAE and South African companies. Those not rich enough to fly can jump into a taxi at Aflao market and find themselves at Agege market six hours later. No visa required, thanks to ECOWAS.)
West Legon and Ikeja GRA invite comparison because the well heeled nest in both communities. Many hat tilting mansions dot the streets in both communities. Gorgeous automobiles one would not find anywhere else roll along in both subdivisions. As they say in Ijebu-Imusin, however, a well brought up person should not call a rat a giraffe just because both walk on four legs. The love of order among residents of West Legon deserves respect and commendation. At West Legon, drainage channels actually work! Dwelling homes are not converted to trading houses. Roads are wider and properly maintained. Egregious violations of building codes are rare. Houses are set far back from the street. Fences are low enough for a person on the street to catch a glimpse of the majestic homes behind them. Internal plumbing works. Electricity supply runs faithfully. No motor-cycle taxis exist in West Legon (or in any other section of Accra)! Asked to choose between West Legon and Ikeja GRA, the former would have my vote many times over, although I detest its formless street naming and house numbering manner. City planners should have learned in school how to draw a sensible grid! Is West Legon my dream? My answer: while I know that all things are possible for God to do, most of them, putting me in West Legon, for instance, he would not bother to do.
But West Legon does not represent all of Accra. Tema station teems with people in proportions closer to Idunmota in central Lagos. But Tema is more orderly. A first time visitor who needs to get to Dzorwulu on tro-tro can navigate his or her way through the chaos. For this visitor, tro-tro’s completely affordable fare compensates for the little inconvenience of the pressing crowd. Where an average taxi ride from Atomic Junction to Labone costs six new Ghana cedis, the same trip on a tro-tro requires 30 pesewas! May Allah rain his abundant blessings on tro-tro operators. May they never set out on days the roads wait famished.
A traveler from Lagos cannot but compare Accra tro-tro to Lagos Molue (full size buses) and Danfo (mini buses). You see in Lagos, the size of the vehicle determines its nickname. This visitor discovered that Ghana’s generally courteous and straightforward--except for street names and house numbers--ways extend to the tro-tro system. How else should it be explained that Nigerian commercial vehicle operators force five buttocks into the tro-tro benches on which only three passengers sit in Accra. Burdened with souvenirs during a trip from Tema station to Dzorwulu Junction, the pregnant woman sitting beside me in the tro-tro helped, without being asked, to stuff some of my bags under the seat in front of her. And I am sure the Arts Center traders have not hired her to do this to visitors. Like many other Ghanaians I met, the woman willingly gave me directions about how to instruct the bus mate--I still don’t understand why fare collectors are so called--regarding the closest stop to my hotel. In Lagos, nothing would make me disclose my hotel address to a stranger. Nothing. I found the same courteous attention at Oxford Street, Airport Residential, Achoo, the University at Legon, and even at Palladium, where the houses are older, town planning is less rigid, drainage channels are not as clean, and architectural style is not a major consideration in house construction.
Yes, I went to Palladium looking for the editor of Agoo. On my way there, I changed $20 into Ghana cedis at Makola market without having to get out of the taxi. The money changer simply trusted that the American currency I am offering is genuine! Don’t try that in Lagos, my friend. Even if you tried it, any way, the money changer would not play. The money trader who would change naira for the dollar in moving traffic in Oshodi is not yet born!
My several trips to Tema Station took me through Olusegun Obasanjo Way. Disbelief struck me the first time I was on this multi-laned, well maintained, traffic lighted, orderly main thoroughfare in Accra. My home country’s strong man must not have seen this beautiful road way after it was named for him, I told myself, because the main highway that passes by Olusegun Obasanjo’s farm and home near Lagos stops abruptly and uncompleted in the middle of nowhere. Traveling on that road after a slight rainfall is impossible. And here in Accra is the beautiful Olusegun Obasanjo Way. Charity, in this case, does not start from home. Maybe Kwaku’s people find something in that man that generations of Nigerians fail to appreciate. Nigerians should perhaps export Olusegun Obasanjo to Ghana?
From Dzorwulu to Palladium, from New Town to Independence Square, from Ashesi University to the one and only University of Ghana, this Nigeian visitor, to his utter amazement, found no police or army checkpoints or roadblocks. What does Ghana do with its policemen and women! Where are they? How do they fight crime? I cannot but recommend that Mike Okiro, Nigeria’s top policeman, should talk to his friend (they must be friends) in Ghana. There is probably a lot he can learn from Accra.
The hight point of my travels in Accra is the taxi ride from Tema Station to Palladium. Why ride in a taxi from Tema station to Palladium? The person who answered the phone at Agoo magazine insisted that I should take a taxi because she cannot fathom how to describe the magazine’s location to a tro-tro riding first time visitor (I think she meant cheap tourist) like me. She would give directions only to a taxi driver.
As in all Accra taxis, a small Ghanaian flag flies on the dashboard of my chosen vessel to Palladium. (I forgot to ask if some law required that of all taxis.) But in this car, the Israeli flag stands next to the black star emblazoned red, gold, and green of Ghana. My very cheerful driver explained to me that he is Jewish--“I am a Jew” are his exact words--and that the Israeli flag symbolizes his Sabbatharian religious affiliation. What is that, I asked further. (By the way, Sabbatharian is not yet in Wikipedia, although a Google query returned 1,980 entries.) That moniker belongs to members of The Seventh Day Church of Theocracy, I learned. Questioned whether this is an order within the Seventh Day Adventist Church, my informant said no. Luckily for me, the driver saw my curiosity as an occasion to proselytize. Unusual for the operator of an unmetered taxi cab, he drove slowly so that he can preach to me even when traffic pace kicked upwards after the Aflao Market bottle neck. I learned from my driver that the world will certainly come to a fiery end in 2010. Nigeria, according to him, is the entry point of the devil’s empire in Africa. When he declared the venerable Kofi Annan a principal puppet of the empire, I knew I was on to something about a popular reinterpretation of the UN, the power of the United States, and the spread of high stakes finance capitalism to the larger West African economies. I revealed to my driver that I am a Nigerian and that I am not flattered by his church associating my homeland with the devil’s designs on humanity. My mock protest only yielded more explanations. He said Nigeria stands guilty because it adopted, and is currently popularizing through its off shore banks, the devilish card payment system. Debit and credit cards, according to Sabbatharian theology, do not make commerce more efficient. They represent instead the mark of the beast foretold in the Book of Revelation. Bank cards constitute the devil’s tracking device which in 2010 would become the only voter ID acceptable during the UN sponsored forthcoming contest for the election of the world president! Are you dizzied by this report? Imagine your poor traveler’s dismay when he first heard it.
On this research visit, I learned far more that I set out to do. My passionate informant revealed to me that America is the dragon lamb spoken about in the Book of Revelation. This deceptively meek animal nurtures dragon fire in its belly, and the UN is its main trick for the establishment of one-world government. In Sabbatharian imagination, the world wide clamoring for “clean water” (my informant used that phrase many times), a sustainable ecological regime, and other globe-girdling (that expression belongs to Gayatri Spivak) demands all derive from the deceptive machinations of the dragon lamb itself. They are means of fooling the world, as predicted in the Book of Revelation, into submission. The dragon lamb and its accomplices work this way because they know that the promise of clean water, good schools, equality, decent wages, etc., would win partisans for them.
Having attended a few days earlier at Ashesi University an NGO (College for Ama [CoFA]) supported event aimed at encouraging young girls in rural schools to aspire to gaining college education, the Sabbatharian ideology had an immediate resonance for me. It looks like both NGO philanthropy and the market oriented instruments of finance capitalism being touted in West Africa is creating a cultic backlash. Is the taxi driver’s religion a sort of advanced warning, I cannot but speculate? I hesitate to dismiss his terribly reactionary reprocessing of changes around him as a false ideology. After all, this is a very earnest man who would not take the bait I threw with a comment about very beautiful Accra women. The husband of one wife and father of two children warned me to avoid the eternal damnation which such sinful thoughts and speech would bring me. Of course, he is not a joyless religious fanatic. The “Blue for Life” sticker on his front windshield proclaims his loyalty to Chelsea Football Club, one of England’s premier league soccer clubs! When it comes to English soccer, some lambs, it appears, are simply lambs.
At the end of the fare, I was advised to look for a Sabbatharian community when I return to Lagos because that is the only way I can protect myself from the impending pernicious reign of the dragon lamb. (I did not tell my preacher that I live and work inside the womb of the dragon lamb.) Whoever follows Yahweh’s laws, as taught by the Sabbatharians, guarantees himself or herself the protection of the only true God.
My introduction to Sabbatharianism leads me to believe that some resentment lies beneath Ghana’s appearance of order. The backward theology made me rethink the serenity of West Airport and West Legon. I started to see that every home in the placid suburb has a G4S (an originally Dutch company, I think) security emblem pasted on its gate. I also noticed that, like in Ikeja GRA in Lagos, reams of razor sharp barbed wires sit atop thousands of miles of fencing. These, and the beliefs of my Sabbatharian driver, nudge me to think that perhaps Ghana’s middle class, like its Nigerian bedfellows, is hiding something. When I recollect that everyone knows that Ghana has discovered oil in commercial quantity, my Sabbatharian education tells me that the full fledged reign of the dragon lamb lies around the corner. Ghana beware.
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