Sodom and Gomorrah, and other stories

Because now it was dead and stale.  In fact it was more.  It was filled with debris, and garbage, and plastics, and all the kinds of rubbish you could imagine.  Mix all that with sewage.  The people of Sodom and Gomorrah, in uptown Accra, live and love right on top of where they also defecate!  […]

Because now it was dead and stale.  In fact it was more.  It was filled with debris, and garbage, and plastics, and all the kinds of rubbish you could imagine.  Mix all that with sewage.  The people of Sodom and Gomorrah, in uptown Accra, live and love right on top of where they also defecate!  It was a great spectacle to behold and in my white shirt and black suit, I looked right out of place there.   I just hoped they would think I was there looking for some long-lost cousin.

You had to pay about ten pesewas to enter Sodom, to the burly men who manned the ‘gates’.  The ‘gates’ themselves were no gates at all, but the beginning of ramshackle wooden bridges that had been built by the community.  There is absolutely no government presence in Sodom and Gomorrah.  The day before my visit, I had listened to the Mayor of Accra talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, promising that the government will demolish the place.  I felt the name was interesting and I needed to see what the issues were.  To access this sordid environment, one had to waddle through a market and sawmill or ironmonger’s yard of sort.  And then there it was; the kiosk town.  Everybody lives in tiny kiosks which were propped up, essentially because the place must be a haven for rodents.  And that stench!  God have mercy!

I walked inside Sodom, where thousands live – from different parts of West Africa – and expectedly saw so many little children.  The birth rate in these kinds of environments are usually more than healthy, but perhaps 4 out of every 10 children die of some disease or the other, before the age of 5.  There are aspects of our sociology that have been neglected by the powerful people of this world.  If they cared, they should have known that the rich have stopped having children, while the children of the poor will overtake and overrun the world soon enough the way things are going.  That should worry them enough to make necessary changes, and give back to society, and be less greedy, and sacrifice more.  But no!  In Ghana, most ‘decent’ people do not know where Sodom is, nor do they care.

Still Sodom and Gomorrah is not just a Ghanaian affair.  It is mostly and African and Asian affair.  But before you rejoice that we have company, note that Asia has perhaps 50 percent of world population, while the whole of sub-Saharan Africa – where poverty is more painful and accentuated – has just 10% of world population.  If we as people would rather paint glossy pictures of our countries, while we allow our brothers and sisters to live in environments too debasing for even wild animals, then shame on the black man.  For it occurred to me on my visit to Sodom, that even beasts of the forest care about their environment and would not live, eat and sleep in stinking and dirty environments.  Even the rats of Sodom and Gomorrah, find cosy little, neat holes to burrow every morning.  I also realized that for as long as such poor and crassly awful environments exist in Africa, and for as long as we see nothing wrong with it, the leaders of the Western – and even Arab and Asian – worlds, will continue to consider black people as less than animals, and dispensable slaves, whom they should sell ammunitions to, to destroy themselves!

Any racist white person who visits Sodom, will say ‘I told you so, these people cannot self-govern… see, they live like beasts’.

Still there are many Sodom and Gomorrahs in black Africa.  Here in Abuja, Mr Eddie Iroh, former DG of NTA, recently wrote about his visit to Dutse Alhaji.  I had also been to some internal parts of Jikwoyi and Mararaba, where conditions are not any better.  A lot of the problems have to do with education and orientation.  Our people’s beliefs in voodoo and extreme religion and archaic tradition, is what blocks them from seeing that they are killing themselves daily by living in such environments.  Our governments must also realize that development is measured in terms of the environments that people live.  Walter Rodney had written in the early 80s, that “ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, IS A PEOPLE’S INCREASED CAPACITY FOR DEALING WITH THE ENVIRONMENT, WHICH IS DEPENDENT ON THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF THE LAWS OF NATURE (SCIENCE), AND HOW THEY UTILISE THAT UNDERSTANDING TO DEVELOP TOOLS (TECHNOLOGY)”…  This presupposes that we should measure our development as a people, not by the number of skyscrapers we have in our cities, or our ability to buy and use the latest appliances sold to us by other thinking peoples, but by how the least amongst us survive.

We Africans especially should take it as a challenge to assist government and take charge of our environments.  This is one of the reasons why some of us rooted for Muhammadu Buhari in the last elections.  A major plank of his programmes in 1983-85 was about the environment, and it could be said that Nigeria was then on its way to development, going by the above definition.  But see where we are today?

Aside from the encounter with Sodom, Ghana’s other challenges are also common with other West African countries. Nigerians like to think they are unique, but all the countries in West Africa were merged by the colonial masters in the same manner.  In the north of those countries are ‘Hausa’ Muslims and in the south were believers in traditional religion who were converted enmasse to Christianity.  In Ghana today, they never get tired of talking about Nigeria’s Boko Haram problem, and of course the mainly Christian-dominated press there, seize the opportunity to somehow deride the other religion and those that practice it.  In other words, there is an infiltration of western propaganda, which seeks to cast Muslims in bad light.  If the Ghanaians were thinking more strategically, they will do well to avoid falling in any religious pit, because this thinking can engulf the whole of West Africa in religious strife!   Still a lot of work exists for Muslims in Africa, because some of the poorest areas of Accra, like Numan, are inhabited by them.

The Muslims of Africa have found themselves in a reactionary position, caught between embracing technological advancements and rejecting Christianity in favour of their own religion.    The challenge now is that they must ensure that they leverage on technological improvements around them, while still keeping their beautiful religion, as the Arabs have done.  In Agbgbloshi Market, Accra, it is common to hear people deride ‘northerners’, who have left their towns up north to come and do menial jobs and crowd Accra.  But their statements are not as vicious as what you hear from many southern Nigerians against their northern brothers.

For those readers who wanted to hear the bad news about Ghana after my glowing portrayal two weeks ago, well there you have it!  But before you roll out the drums in celebration, note that Ghana was among the only 4 African countries who may achieve most of the MDG 2015 goals, as announced by the UN last week.  Nigeria’s name was nowhere to be found in spite of the accolades they like to pour on the giant of Africa.  Anyway, happy 51st Anniversary to the great country, Nigeria!!