10 April 2007, by Nana Kofi Acquah in Accra. Ghana celebrated her 50th Independence Anniversary with grandeur. The hope of the people was revived again. For the first time in a long time, Ghanaians looked beyond their political affiliations and came together to dance and celebrate for weeks, climaxing it all on the 6th of March 2007 with parades in every regional capital.
The hope that died with Nkrumah"s overthrow was reborn, every high street was decorated with a billboard of Kufuor trying to snatch a piece of Nkrumah"s glory. Every streetlight was decorated with the famous red, yellow, green and black colours of Ghana"s flag (though they were stolen and sold or used as bed sheets the very same day they were displayed). Young men and women hawked everything in Ghana"s colours; sachets of water, pens, flags, stickers, caps, cups, T-shirts, dresses, shoes, belts, books, calendars, and an uncountable number of other wares.
The ordinary Ghanaian started smelling money and national dignity once again and could, for a moment, ignore the politicians who were busy thinking 'who gets to keep which car after the celebrations?". Tourists flooded in from every country to witness the spectacle. It was a good time to own a hotel or have a spare room in your apartment. As a people, we got high on the smell of money and respect. We got so high, we forgot the festering, itchy power crisis (not political but electrical) that had been crawling in for donkey"s years... And what better timing! Just when we thought we"re up again, this crisis has come to wake us up to a nightmare. And a scary one at that.
Now Volta Aluminium Company (Valco) has folded up, with many more to follow suit. The cost of production of most local manufacturing companies has shot through the roof due to the electricity load shedding exercise and they are scared to increase the prices of their goods to absolve the additional cost. No. Not with the president baring his teeth at Ghana Cement (Ghacem) in his office recently. It was on TV for all to see.
Unilever Ghana, already stressed by cheap competition from China, now has to spend 45,000 U.S dollars every month on energy following the power rationing exercise. Valco"s closure has affected over 200 companies, who at the moment, still can"t figure out how to import their raw materials from another country (obviously at a higher price), power their machines with generators, and still sell at the same old price, as any attempt to increase prices will mean all their consumers would just turn to the cheaper substitutes that flood the market.
May be, all the free publicity really didn"t help. Remember what we say in advertising? "The fastest way to kill a bad product, is to advertise it". Here was Kufuor eating potatoes (though he prefers fufu) with the queen of England and pretending he liked it. Look, the man even said Europeans should ignore the Africans who ask for reparation for the transatlantic slave trade in which over 100 million Africans died because Africans are as guilty. He was being all nice, hoping he could attract some investors... and then the nightmare.
So, the power crisis, obviously is an anticlimax in what should have been a lovely "Ghana @ 50 and Rising" story but hopefully that"s not the end...considering I don"t like stories with sad endings. I hope Ghana discovers a Steve Jobs, a Lee Chow and a Steve Hayden who together, can give us our own Apple 1984. But I guess, it should start with a government that is ready to 'think different".
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