I AM NOT YVONNE NELSON

iz was the unserious type. I later gathered that he had been sacked from Achimota Basic School for poor academic performance. That information didn’t dent my love for him. What he lacked

whole started in my childhood. Long before America’s culture and lifestyle conscripted me through entertainment, I had begun to compare and question the things that were made in Ghana and those made in Europe, America or Asia. If I bought a pencil here in Ghana and saw another pencil from a classmate whose parent or other relative had returned from the United States or Europe with it as a gift, I compared mine with theirs. Most of the time, the difference was clear. There was always something about the foreign-made product that made the local ones look inferior. There are some who argue that such difference is rooted in the inferiority mindset of the black, but that is not true. The finishing or packaging of the foreign ones stood out. The crude and haphazardly assembled products made here appeared as though the manufacturers here did not care about competition or aesthetics. As I grew older, I began to see beyond the look and feel of foreign-made products. It began to dawn on me that Ghana, Africa and the black race in general, were helpless and had to look outside for solutions to the most basic problems plaguing them. Attempts to instill empty words and vague slogans of patriotism in the youth did not help change this mentality in me because the reality on the ground was in stark contrast to what my teachers and books said about being black and proud of one’s heritage. That reality drowned the hopes of the founding fathers and what, in their days, were considered inspirational rallying calls for the advancement of Africa and the black race. No child in my days went through basic school without learning about the story of Ghana’s independence. And no textbook told that story without the role of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the man who led Ghana to independence. Nkrumah is remembered for the profundity of his proclamations, the strength of his convictions and his faith in the black race. I’m unsure whether he carried this optimism to the grave or whether the circumstances surrounding his overthrow and exile taught him that he trusted too much in a people who had no trust in themselves. Known as one of the greatest pan-Africanists to ever live, Nkrumah was fiercely optimistic about Africa’s ability to take charge of its destiny and prove a point to the rest of the world. On the eve of Ghana’s independence, he declared that “the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with total liberation of the African continent.” His quest for a united Africa, which took a life of its own in the Nkrumah era, was personified in these words. For his faith in the black race, Dr. Nkrumah declared on that night: “But also, as I pointed out, that also entails hard work. That new Africa is ready to fight her own battles and show that, after all, the black man is capable of managing his own affairs.” As a child growing up and learning these words, I soon came to the realisation that they were empty slogans, especially because the first part that talked about hard work is often left out in both Nkrumah’s quote and the endeavours of the black continent. I was born two decades after Nkrumah left the political scene in Ghana. However, I have learned a few of the things he did to practicalise the words he so eloquently declared on the night the Union Jack was lowered. In its place, the Red, Yellow, and Green with the Black Star was hoisted proudly and it fluttered audaciously with the promise of a new nation. After Nkrumah and his generation, however, there has not been much evidence to prove that the black man—whether in Africa or the diaspora— is capable of managing his own affairs. Sometimes, I genuinely hope that I am wrong. I hope that I am too pessimistic. The reality, however, often defeats any attempt I make at optimism. For instance, Ghana is among the world’s leading producers of cocoa and gold and is home to a host of other natural minerals and fertile soil. However, we have no say in the value chain of the raw materials we produce. We still export raw cocoa beans and get next to nothing from the multi-billion-dollar chocolate industry. Our gold is mostly mined by foreign companies and refined abroad. When we struck oil in commercial quantities, we lacked the economic and technical capacities to exploit it, so we looked up to the West, and, as usual, our percentage in it is negligible when compared to the countries whose companies are mining the oil. When politicians talk about adding value to our farm produce and moving beyond an agrarian economy to an industrial one, they are almost always in opposition. In government, they are too occupied with amassing wealth for themselves and their descendants to think about the lofty ideas they espoused when they were hungry for power. Dictated by their insatiable greed and consumed by their selfish interests, our leaders sign some of the worst contracts when they have the opportunity to negotiate on our behalf. The little revenue we derive from our resources are often misused, leaving too little with which to provide critical social needs and infrastructure. In an era when our Asian counterparts who were like us at independence are miles ahead of us, we do not seem to have any concrete plans to make us competitive on the global stage. We have no sense of urgency. Our education is still a relic of our colonial past. Our lawyers and judges still wear white wigs and are compelled to be fully robed in the blistering heat when very few of the courtrooms outside the national capital have air-conditioners or proper ventilation. Despite our enormous human resources, we seem to contribute nothing to the world of science and invention. The black men and women who have stood out have done so on the fertile grounds of innovation created for them in America or Europe. Back home, we tend to hold fast to cultural practices that add nothing to our humanity and progress. I have always expressed these frustrations to friends and we would rant and conclude that the solution is not rocket science. The greed that made us willingly sell our own race to others in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is still the creed in most African countries. It is in our DNA. So, I sometimes ask myself: if I were that white what would I make of blacks and their nations that are beggars? What respect would I have for a continent that is endowed with resources, but is so hopelessly helpless that when disaster strikes, its default position is to look to others for salvation? If we flipped the coin, would we genuinely think that we deserve the same amount of respect that should be accorded people of other races and continents, those who continue to make advances while we kill one another in greed-induced civil wars? Most of the time, the voices that speak up against our failure and bad governance are those of academics, political activists and civil society groups. The discourse in Ghana, however, got into unconventional circles and the frustration got to every lip between 2013 and 2015, when erratic power supply disrupted every sphere of life and threatened to further undermine the little progress we had made. A nation of nearly 30 million people was still relying mainly on the hydropower systems constructed by the Kwame Nkrumah administration when the population of the nation was less than 8 million. When the power crises persisted, the pinch became so severe that even the most passive observers became active participants in our discourse. The politics of “dumsor” dominated media discussions. The name of the recurring phenomenon of unstable power supply, dumsor, is derived from two Twi words—”dum,” meaning “switch off”, and meaning “switch on”. Dumsor wasn’t new, but the one recorded in that period is the worst in living memory. I am not an expert on energy, governance or economics, so my frustration with the power crises was mostly with friends and people in my circles. But one night, I was compelled to take my ranting to Twitter when I was tired of buying diesel to power my generator set. Besides the heat I had to endure in the absence of electricity, my health was also at risk. I use Xalacom eyedrop, which needs refrigeration. I have a family history of glaucoma, and that medication, according to information available online, is meant to reduce “intraocular pressure (IOP) in patients with open-angle glaucoma and ocular hypertension”. I had to refrigerate the medication and since the national grid was almost always off, I had to keep the generator on. The cost of fuel was draining me financially. My most pressing need for an uninterrupted supply of power was to store medication. There were others whose very livelihoods depended on electricity. It was for this reason that when I tweeted my frustration and ended with #DumsorMustStop, I woke up the following morning to find that the hashtag had caught fire on Twitter and was trending for days on end. In the midst of the trend, the Citizen Ghana Movement pressure group reached out to me. They wanted to discuss how we could capitalise on the mood generated by my hashtag to pile greater pressure on the government to fix the problem. I met with leaders of the pressure group, lawyers Kofi Bentil and Nana Kwasi Awuah. The two had broken away from the OccupyGhana pressure group, which was the outcome of a non-partisan protest in 2014. I bought into their idea and they set to work on the legal requirements ahead of what became the #DumsorMustStop protest. On my part, I reached out to all the celebrities I knew and sold the idea of the protest to them. It was an opportunity for those of us in the arts and entertainment industry to make our voices count, but not many of them responded. I was, however, happy that the few who came on board did so wholeheartedly. They included Efya Nocturnal, Van Vicker, D-Black, Prince David Osei, DKB, Kweku Elliot and Sarkodie. Sarkodie could not make it to the protest, but he recorded a hit song about the power crises. It was normal that a problem of that magnitude would give a political advantage to the opposition political parties, so while the government did not take kindly to our protest, the oppos