REFLECTIONS OF A MISERABILIST…
I visited my hometown over the last weekend to attend the funeral of a very good friend of mine who unfortunately passed on at the extremely young age of twenty-seven. It was also the funeral of the dad of another friend of mine in Ajumako. Traveling between the two towns to attend both funerals afforded me the opportunity to drive through and observe my hometown, which I affectionately refer to as the higher civilisation, a term I borrowed from the Political Scientist, Dr.Amos Anyimadu.
A couple of months ago, an acquaintance with the Ghana Fire Service sent me a message about his visit to my beloved hometown and said “I was left very impressed by the carefully layed out plan of your hometown.” This acquaintance obviously thought my ‘holy city’, Ajumako Bisease was a concrete jungle of haphazard structures and was left slightly bemused by what he saw.
In my recent visit to the higher civilisation, I decided to observe it from the lens of history. Driving through the well-layed streets and observing the ancient building structures in what I call the old town, one could sense this was a land once brimming with ambition. It would have been a place filled with young ambitious folks burning with desire to do better.
Yet I could see that old town is no more. Something strange is happening now. That home of grandeur dreams and ambitions is gone. In its place is a polity of unimaginatively timid folks low on dreams and aspiration content with a once-glorious town being reduced to a labyrinthine alleys of a shanty slum. To be fair, much of the decline of my hometown mirrors a national decline in aspiration and development.
The question I kept asking myself as I traversed the town was what went wrong? What is going wrong?
It was dusk. 27th October 2023. I was still battling the existential crisis that had afflicted me with a ferocious insomnia that made sleep such a rare pleasure for me. I had already enjoyed the customary three-hours sleep which had become my pattern of the last six months. I tried reading Toni Morrison’s magnificent novel, ‘Song of Solomon’, to a background music of Amakye Dede’s ‘Kanea Maye Kyere Me’. The preacher woman was at it today in the neighbourhood with her message on Jesus and repentance. I pitied her commitment and conviction. This too intrigued me about the country. The outward appearance of a righteous people who nevertheless were neck-deep in their corrupt ways.
I didn’t want to seem desperate but I was desperate. She knew this too but there was something different about her voice today. She was genuinely concerned about us. I was never concerned about us. I believed in us. She also believed in us but her fear had gripped me too.
It was the kind of day when the sun smacked from the middle of the sky making the heat unbearable. I took a deep breath, wiped my face of the sweat and decided to go in now. It was no use stopping the sweating. I was a man under pressure and this was its moment. The image of the man who had sat alone at his table at the lounge the night before came to me. I had reckoned he was a lonely man and we had laughed at my presumptuousness. I wondered if that was going to be my fate too.
I sat alone in the car, in the parking lot of the hospital. I don’t know why I had taken the detour to the hospital. I just saw the sign by the side of the road and decided to follow the sign. I wanted to be off the highway to clear my mind. I was still reeling from the pain of the conversation earlier in the day. I was in no mood for self-pity but I just wondered why no one at all could understand me. Was it just the generational difference?
It is 7p.m. and I’m seated at the rooftop bar at Ofankor with two of my buddies. They had no idea the turmoil that was going on in my mind. I quietly watched the men sitting across from our side of the bar. They clutched their bottles of club beer as if they were some precious commodities. As they danced to the loud music, they spoke in a very animated way and I wondered what they could be talking about. What do drunk men talk about? I wondered how many of them were going to drift to bed later that night oblivious of their staggering dance at the rooftop bar.
Two hours later, I am back behind the wheels but can’t bring myself to drive. A certain inertia had immobilised me and I couldn’t move. I was lost. I found myself praying but didn’t even know what I was praying for.
We had hastily made plans for the outing in Kumasi. In less than two hours after she had grudgingly agreed that I visit her, she had also suggested I took her to dinner in Kumasi when I was around. I readily agreed. The outing itself had surprised me. Everything had been surreal. She told me she was surprised that she was still deeply in love with me. She thought she had lost it all.
I was happy because I was going to avoid the sagging bed of the lodge I had slept in the night before, where the television didn’t work and the toilet had a funny smell. I paid 22 dollars for such an awful room. I was glad to be away.
Then came the call, as I sat by her at the pub, sipping my black label whiskey on ice, watching her drool over her chicken wings whilst we both listened to the jazz music. The call had changed her mood – our mood. We left shortly after. She tried assuring me everything was okay. I pretended to be okay and amused her.
The tears came when I was driving to Maxwell’s apartment. I parked by the side of the road, undid the seat-belts and sobbed. She leaned across the gear shift to hold me. She held me as the tears flowed freely till it mellowed to gentle whimpers. I knew she was still in love then but I knew that love was in danger.
The traffic on the Achimota to Tesano stretch was incessant. The traffic in this city has worsened in the last decade since I moved here. The endless flow of cars doesn’t seem to be abating anytime soon. Sitting at the rooftop bar, you could grasp a bird’s eye view of the city. It is a city undergoing an ever-quickening pace of urbanisation. The slums are springing up alongside the Taj Mahal-like mansions. It appears to be a city devoid of any form of spatial planning. Green spaces are as rare as the presence of water on a desert. Accra is just like any other African city – over-populated and dense.
The United Nations predict that Africa will be home to forty percent of humanity by the end of the century. The top twenty fastest-growing cities in the world will be in sub-Saharan Africa. How will an Africa already grappling with massive economic underdevelopment deal with such a conundrum? What should be the appropriate policy response by policy makers? How will the urban poor deal with such a modern city considering the level of income inequality such development will wreck? The poor are often at the mercy of nature. They are strangers to safety but I shudder to think about the future of the urban poor living in African mega-cities in 2057 without any form of social safety net.
How must Africa deal with its population growth? Between 1950 and 2050, the populations of Uganda and Ethiopia is estimated to grow by eighteen to twenty times. Compare that to the Irish county town, Ros-commons, where the population today is lower than it was in 1829. In just a decade, the population of Dar es Salaam, the capital city of Tanzania, has grown by a whopping forty percent. Ghana, a country with a population of about six million people at the time of independence in 1957 is projected to have a population exceeding fifty million by 2050.
Is Africa’s population growth sustainable? Perhaps it is time we finally sit down to have a serious conversation of our population growth.
A week ago today, I was driving to Kumasi in a happy mood, playing Lana Del Rey’s California. Today, I’m curled up in bed, sad and lonely, playing Gnash’s I Love you, I Hate you… such is the messed-up, twisted roll coaster of my life now. I’d drift to bed trying to read Yewande Omotoso’s An Unusual Grief…I pray I’m able to sleep tonight…