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Ghana and
PACA
by
Peter Ezeh
The party of three of us:
Dr Kunle Filani of Lagos State College of Education; the
Rev Jaco Sieberhagen, the remarkable pastor/sculptor
from South Africa, and I, had a relatively smooth time
of it on our way to Accra from Lagos. I was already
familiar with Jaco’s peculiar sculpture in which he
breathes life into recovered objects. I had seen his
statement about women intellectualism in a piece he made
using a gourd that formed a woman shape, and he
completed it by giving it an academic-board cap and
decorating its face to present a very comely face of a
shapely lady. He sent it as part of his participation in
the exhibition by the Pan-African Association of
Artists, PACA, ahead of his arrival in person but it was
only the previous evening that I got the opportunity to
meet him in the flesh. He had dropped in at Pendulum
Gallery where I had gone to ask director Peter Areh to
lend his computer to type the speech I was preparing for
the Ghana event. The usual impossible schedules at
school would not allow me to get the speech ready before
arriving Lagos that eve of the commencement of the
series of events that would round off this year’s
edition of PACA’s study tour of selected African
countries.
PACA is an association of visual art scholars for
Africans and Africanists that began in University of
Nigeria, Nsukka, a decade ago and has since 2001 always
organized a first-hand visit to selected African
countries interspersing this with symposia, exhibitions
and talks with art and culture policy-makers as they go.
This year they began in Lagos and went on to visit Benin
Republic, Togo, Burkina Faso, and Mali, before holding
the grand finale of the event in Accra, Ghana, from 26
January to 30 January.
Kunle, Jaco and I did not join the touring team. But we
were all to give talks at theAccra event.
Yemisi Shyllon, a civil engineer and arguably Nigeria’s
number-one private art collector, was also going toAccra
in his capacity as PACA’s patron, but he was doing so as
a VIP, to use the slang. So, ordinarily we wouldn’t
count on his pleasant fate. But I was really worried
about Jaco from the moment we left our hotel in the
salubriously sleepy Lekki new suburb of Lagos Victoria
Island districts. He was a first-time visitor and it
could be dangerously deceitful to mistake the relative
peacefulness of Lekki for the characteristic life in
Lagos. I tried to hide my worry from Jaco although I
made sure I suggested he should not be too trusting with
important materials and money, or unwatchful of his
luggage.
Happily there was no incident until we got to the
airport. And it is easy to see why I felt so relieved if
one knows that this is one of the places where violent
criminals have got so daring that there was a report the
other time of an attack on a bullion van that was being
escorted by a crack detail of policemen armed to the
teeth.
For a flight advertised for 9.55 am Nigerian time we
deliberately got up by 5.00 a.m. in the morning for the
less than 15 kilometre trip. Any time later would
definitely mean that we would stay in the chaos of the
immobile traffic jam until late forenoon at the
luckiest.
Kunle, travelling from another part of the metropolis,
apparently made a similar calculation, as would anyone
familiar with Lagos. Shyllon walked up to the three of
us a while afterwards and it was just seconds before all
the five of us (including a friend of his due to travel
in the same flight) were chatting away as if we had been
chums for decades
From the Customs to the Immigration and whatnot, our
airport experience was a pleasant surprise. We went
through various counters relatively easily. The checks
were meticulous, strict but straight. A man in civvies
and of Caucasian features, most probably a non-
Nigerian, carried out the last of these using some
gadgets unfamiliar to me.
It wasn’t always like this. I remember having to fly off
the handle at one point at the unending puerile searches
and barefaced mendicancy by all sorts of posses of
officials while returning from a conference from Austria
in 1996. It was during the infamous General Abacha days.
Late last year when I passed through this airport again
I thought I was just being lucky. But the present
experience seemed to have confirmed that the improvement
in the behaviour of Nigeria’s security personnel at the
airport was by design. As I will show below, sadly, this
orderly stringent but straight checks at the airport
formed a contrast with parallel activities at the land
border.
As the state-of-the-art Emirate airbus took off you
noticed if you looked down that the grassed portion of
the airport had been burnt. It was the second time I saw
an airport that was burnt in this manner. The first one
was some years back at Enugu, about 500 kilometres
southeast of Lagos. Enugu airport wasn’t yet burnt when
I passed through there again this year but two footpaths
run across its grassed area like the fume trailing a big
jet. I understand that locals use them to walk to a
nearby stream, their only source of water after the
pipe-borne one stopped running for about one whole year
now.
My impression of Ghana began at the Kotoka Airport. You
answered your share of questions and if necessary got
searched. The Customs marked a number on your luggage
and if you had not got anything wrong, off you went.
For a citizen of ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West
African States grouping the countries in this
sub-region, the matter was even shorter and simpler. You
could have been entering your village and being received
by members of your kin group!
There was a small anxiety when Jaco using a different
counter as a non-ECO WAS national hadn’t joined us
immediately. When he eventually did he bore no grudges.
He was satisfied that the officers were merely trying to
be thorough in their job. With the post-9/11 uncertainty
and international wrangles, you couldn’t take anything
for granted anywhere, anyway.
For someone travelling from Nigeria, the contrast
between these two English-speaking west African
countries in terms of organisation was as marked as a
tropical night and day. Outside the airport you found
that every taxi you saw was painted a colour to
distinguish it from cars that were used for other
purposes. Besides this it mounted a roofbox proclaiming
this status. Perhaps more importantly I later
discovered, when I began using their services, how
honest and friendly the cabbies themselves could be.
From the airport through the National Theatre to the
famed W.E.B. du Bois International Centre venue of the
events Shyllon was the avuncular big brother. I don’t
remember having experienced such a rare blend of
hilarity and intellectual depth in one man.
As we rode with him in the hired jeep in that roundabout
jolly jaunt, he asked to be permitted to stop over at a
bookshop to buy for his undergraduate daughter the
textbooks they couldn’t get in Nigeria. This bookshop
could have been a W.H.Smith! Here they are: the latest
editions of Chinua Achebe’s novels I had always wanted
to own. What I used to see in Nigeria were mainly
pirated copies of the old editions. I also bought a copy
of Karl Maier’s This House Has Fallen, which I had been
hearing of but never before seen. It is the story of the
Nigerian situation whose title the reporter took from
novelist Achebe’s grim summary on the subject.
Bookshops in Nigeria used to be as well stocked as this
too when I was growing up but not anymore. In lieu of
that what you may see are open-air second-hand car sales
depots with seas of flivvies of all descriptions. When
lineups of these are not in filling stations waiting for
petrol that is hardly ever there, their barely literate
to stark illiterate drivers are in the streets driving
with utter contempt to civilized traffic rules. You will
be lucky each day you go home without being counted
among the macabre statistics of the 15, 000 or so souls
that they kill every year. The Federal Road Safety
Commission that was once commanded by the Nobel winning
writer Wole Soyinka to try to control such a senseless
blood-letting used to warn in a newspaper advert that
Nigeria held the world’s worst road accident records.
The PACA group had accepted to have a dinner in the
house of Virginia Ryan, the wife of the Italian
Ambassador who too is a painter and photographer and who
was showing her works as one of the artists in Ghana. Up
until 10pm local time there was no sign that the
peripatetic artists were anywhere near the Ghanaian
capital. It was the next day at the exhibition venue
that we learnt that bad road and the condition of the
old bus by which they were travelling from Mali combined
to get them stranded until repairs had been carried out.
When Shyllon spoke during a vote of thanks at the dinner
he touched on one marvel of the Ghanaian phenomenon. It
was not so much a matter of having so much things work.
Such attribute is comparable with PACA’s. With little or
no money to spend, nevertheless, the team of Krydz
Ikwuemesi, Ayo Adewunmi, both art lecturers, and their
friends had done more for the promotion of art than some
governments’ departments with fat budgets were able to
do. Dr Joe Nkrumah made similar remarks regarding PACA
when he spoke later two days afterwards at the symposium
at du Bois Centre. Indeed it was the echo in the hall as
one artist after another from all the participating
countries spoke.
In his inimitable touch of humour, Shyllon said, “When I
arrived here this afternoon I thought it was only to
come and witness the PACAevent. I didn’t know it also
had to it a deal to make me a millionaire. I changed
$200 moments afterwards and I needed a basket to carry
it home.”
Hearty laughter echoed from around the tables. Shyllon’s
remark in a sense is food-for-thought for many other
African countries. Amidst such relative poverty, the
desperation for wealth at the expense of social order
was nearly totally absent.
To get a taxi when we left that night, we walked some
100 metres, some of us strapping our bags. No one
harassed us. Neither the taxi-man nor the passengers
were afraid of each other. Note that in Lagos hijacking
of buses, not to mention cars, is a common occurrence in
daytime as in the night.
Kunle gave a demographic explanation to the Nigerian
problem. “The population is just too much”, the art don
said as we thought aloud on our way home. But neither of
us was an economist nor a criminologist. However, it
seems undebatable that the factors might lay deeper than
that.
Whatever might be the real cause, the level of violence,
often with strategies and weapons that no poor gang can
afford, is serious symptom of a severe social disease.
After a number of assassinations of some highly placed
people in January and February this year, President
Obasanjo said that violence had reached unacceptable
dimensions. On Monday, 8 March, when the BBC asked its
Lagos correspondent, former editor in chief of The Punch
group and a veteran war reporter during the Biafran
hostilities, Sola Odunfa, for a story on the latest
murders, his emotion-laden voice gave a summary of the
situation in his very first sentence. “These are really
bad times in Nigeria for personal security generally”.
I was already on my way back to Nigeria when I saw the
first Ghanaian policeman in uniform. I chose to travel
by road, and the four of us passengers; two men, and two
women, boarded the BMW saloon taxi. The driver asked for
our permission to go and leave a message with his family
in one of the Accra suburbs. It was on ourway that I saw
the cop walking into one of the streets that formed a
T-junction with the one we were in.
It should make an interesting case study in criminology
that Ghana’s relaxed social life is with minimal police
obtrusiveness. In the evening of the third day of our
stay I had asked a question that set both our Ghanaian
friends and Kunle laughing at my rather school-boy
curiosity. “What is the colour of Ghana’s police
uniform?”
Kunle trying hard to arrest his laughter told me that it
was very nearly like Nigeria’s. He saw some policemen
the previous evening when he had a walk. But everyone
sympathised with the basis of my question. Kunle
characteristically waxing philosophical once again said
there were reasons for hope yet. “As the democracy
becomes truly participatory,” he began, “there may be
more improvement.”
It turned out that the couple riding with us in the taxi
to Nigeria were ministers in one of the teeming new-
generation miracle-seeking churches. The other lady was
in transit through Ghana in a trip originating in a
Middle Eastern country. As is now common in Nigeria, the
church couple shouted prayers and chanted hardly
melodious choruses for the better part of one hour.
What the Ghanaian end of the dirt road that links it
with Togo lacked in good engineering it made up with
cultured immigration formalities. Theirs was the only
one of the four borders where officials took no bribes,
or were rude.
When I compared notes with Krydz lkwuemesi who traveled
with his colleagues in a chartered bus, he told me that
things came to a head when he attempted to film the
Togo-Ghana border. The officers almost seized his Cam-corder
and nothing would make them let go until 10,000 CFA
francs was paid as bribe. Here every person crossing
must pay some unofficial amount to these powerful border
personel. On the day we passed it was 2000 CFA francs
for those with complete papers and 3000 CFA francs for
those without.
The extortion continued at the Benin-Togo borders and
hit its climax at the Benin-Nigeria border. Everyone in
the car was more experienced than I on the route. They
told me that we were witnessing a routine occurrence.
The church couple told me that they themselves simply
did not bother to get traveling papers. “What these
people at the borders want is money” the man said in one
of his unguarded moments. “They don’t want anybody’s
papers.”
The driver said that he heard that the Togolese and the
Beninoise began to extort in retaliation for what their
At the Benin-Nigeria border
the church couple just alighted and were led through a
certain path by unofficial escorts. They avoided the
immigration posts. The lady travelling from the Middle
East had no certificates for the compulsory yellow fever
and cholera inoculations. The quarantine officers took
200 Naira from her and passed her. But all manners of
Nigerians claiming to be on one or the other security
checks lined up several metres after the conventional
immigration booth. A good number of those had no
uniform. At some point regular policemen were to be
found too and such ones would usually ask some questions
or sometimes look inside the car and permit you to go.
Those other ones were a different experience. In most
places we encountered them they would demand passports.
The two of us that had would show to them. The church
couple would show ID cards of their sect. Lastly they
would go to the driver and demand a tip. At a point the
driver claimed he had run out of change and altercation
ensued and yet at others he would resort to
soft-soaping, depending on what he read as effective in
the circumstance.
I decide to continue the journey to Enugu the same
evening. As the ticket-seller put her pen to paper to
write, off went the light. Everyone around welcomed the
pitch darkness with a thunderous chorus, “NEPA!” One
voice in our queue added, “Never Expect Power Always!”
Actually the correct name of this monopolist supplier of
electricity is National Electric Power Authority.
Anyway, in Ghana they now not only expect power always,
they have it always too. In my one week there, there
wasn’t a blackout for once and I was told, for indeed
several years now.
Dr Emma Igbo, a sociologist who had been to a conference
in Ghana in 1996, listened to my story of improvement in
that country with utter disbelief. “Their situation was
even worse than Nigeria’s,” he said. My reply was that
his observation only served to buoy up my spirit
further. If Ghana that I just saw was that bad a mere
seven years ago, then it seems that improvement for any
other country is indeed just one truly participatory
democracy away.
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