A REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME

A REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME

 

By CAMERON DUODU
The Ghanaian Times 31 December 2013

One day, I visited my now deceased  old man in our home-town. He was, as usual, very glad to see me.

But as we talked, he kept saying to me, “let your legs become short-short so that they can bring you here often!”

I took that to be a criticism of my inability to visit

him as often as he wanted. And  my guilt put me

on the defensive: “But father” I protested, rather

forcefully, “the work I do often takes me out of

the country without warning!”

He wasn’t impressed. I had foolishly ignored the fact that he was illiterate and

wasn’t   following my writing career

with as much zeal as I would have liked him to do!

He put me firmly in my place when he said calmly, “Oh, come on – don’t you

go rolling your eyes at me!… Your children will do the same thing to you!” 

he enunciated. 

That sentence of my father’s has often come back to haunt me – very many times, I

confess – as my own kids have deserted the roost! They say that the mouths of the elders

are “a fetish”! In other words, the elders would be taken by us as “oracles”, if we only but knew!

All I can say is this: indeed, it is true that the past, the present and the future are all rolled

whether at the “end” of our journey on earth, we shall have  come back  to our starting point

again. We are in a space-time “continuum”! We can’t  comprehend it fully,

We ask ourselves, when we are threatened and need to fortify ourselves psychologically:

“What has never happened before?” 

But do we know what we are actually  saying when we utter those words?

In fact, when we ask that, what we are saying is something deeper than we might

think we are saying. If we were in India, for instance,  and were adequately “developed”

spiritually, we might divine that maybe we had once been in a similar situation before

— in another ‘incarnation’! But of course, we are not allowed to

I hereby present what the River Gandus — assisted

by her sister, Tanolta – has broached to me\

regarding the land of my birth. The séance (for want of a better word) occurred in the operating theatre of our only brain-transplant facility, KoRi-37.

SURGEON: Brain tissue please!

NURSE: Tissue here Sir! Tissue is labelled “Andy Awuni!”

PATIENT (screaming loudly): No! You can’t give me that!

SURGEON: If you are a Jehovah’s Witness, you ought to have declined to sign the consent form!

PATIENT: No I am not a Jehovah’s Witness! But I object to being given Andy Awuni’s brain. The guy is a subversive element’…

SURGEON: Mind your language! A single person cannot constitute a subversive element?

PATIENT: But he has gone to court to challenge the competence of the Bank of Ghana to approve the sale of Merchant Bank to Fortiz! He is also suing the trustees of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust! Plus the directors of Merchant Bank. All those are trust-worthy entities approved by me after due diligence. Yes. (PAUSE). Well, EOCO didn’t say anything bad about them! Yet Awuni is exposing them to public ridicule.

SURGEON: But we live under the Rule of Law! It is our fundamental law, the Constitution– the same law  which enabled you to jump the queue and be on this theatre table today. You have privileges provided by law. Awuni too has his rights as a citizen, as provided by the same fundamental law!

PATIENT: Well the learned judge said he couldn’t sue. Because only a Trustee of SSNIT could sue! Awuni can only sue when he retires and SSNIT is unable to pay him his entitlements, the learned judge said.

SURGEON: And that makes sense to you? No wonder your brain needs a transplant! Suppose by the time Awuni retires, SSNIT has sold off all its investments for a pittance to your selected cronies, how can SSNIT have adequate resources to pay Awuni his entitlements? Anyway, if you don’t like Awuni’s brain, we can’t force it on you. Patriotism is exercised through a voluntary choice made by an individual in accordance with his own conscience – or lack of one. It cannot be imposed by force. Nurse, another brain tissue, please!

NURSE: We’ve only got a collective or synthesised mound of brain tissue left, Sir. People aren’t donating at all these days as individuals. So we have to mould together the leftovers after each operation, Sir.

SURGEON: So no labelling at all on it, then?

NURSE: I can only make out the words Adombusiness.

That can’t be the name of a person, Sir?

PATIENT:(SHRIEKING) No! No!! No!!! No!!!! I know who they are. They are the guys who claimed to have exposed the Ghana Revenue Authority’s deal with SUBAH INFOSOLUTIONS LIMITED! Everyone assumed that because I am an information-stroke-communications expert, I have an affinity of sorts with Subah Infosolutions. That unproven association has done tremendous damage to my reputation. How can you even think of inserting those awful people into my very skull?

MOUND OF BRAIN TISSUE: Doc, may we speak please?

NURSE: Agyei! Mawu oh! (I am done for!) Doctor, the brain tissue spoke! Ei! Where is my mother ? Ei, my father where are you? (SHE WAILS:) Mawu oooo! Mawu nnner! (I am dead today! I am a goner!)

SURGEON: Nurse, pull yourself together! Remember your training! In a surgical theatre, ANYTHING is possible! Everything must be anticipated and dealt with!

NURSE: I hear you Sir. Doctor, the patient has fainted! The patient has fainted! ….

Oxygen! …. Defibrillator!

MOUND OF BRAIN TISSUE: Doctor, may we speak? We know why he doesn’t want us inside his skull. We would turn his conscience into a a torturing implement – like a water-boarding machine!

SURGEON: You may speak! Over here, we treasure freedom of speech. It is for practical reasons. Now, suppose the anaesthetist was afraid to tell me what’s going on. Suppose the Nurse kept things from me…Speak!!

MOUND OF BRAIN TISSUE: We would not have known anything at all about this Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA)/SUBAH deal if the GRA had not formally written a letter dated October 28, 2013 to all telcom operators in the country, asking them to allow Subah Infosolutions Limited to fix auditing equipment on their respective networks, “to check domestic call flows for revenue assurance.” Please note the terminology: domestic call flows; NOT international call flows!

SURGEON: That means that before October 2013, no monitoring could possibly have taken place, because the monitoring equipment had NOT been installed at the premises of the telcom companies?

MOUND: Correct for one hundred points! Now, the letter was written by GRA only AFTER it had been disclosed publicly that illegal payments of about GHC75million had been made by  GRA  to Subah for no work done since 2010! (That was when GRA supposedly contracted Subah to do an electronic audit of the local call billing systems of the telcoms.)

“Following GRA’s first and only formal request to the telcoms, Subah [only then] made contact with each of the telcoms and held a series of closed-door meetings on modalities for doing the electronic audit of their billing systems.

Please note again that GRA only made the formal request to the telcoms after two years of paying Subah for  doing practically nothing for the state.“

SURGEON: And when the media reported this, the officials of the GRA held a press conference to “refute” their “allegations” but refused to stay to answer questions from the media?

MOUND: Ei, Doc, you follow events oh!

MOUND: It must be very frustrating, Doc, to have the skill and yet not have the means to use it to save lives? Well, this guy here does not deserve your services. He could at least have interdicted the GRA officials, pending an ab initio investigation of the allegations made against them. He has done nothing. Gyeeda too, nothing. Migratory akonfems (guinea fowls) nothing. I suppose those guinea fowls are still cluck-clucking all over Burkina Faso trying to land mating partners! At the Ghana taxpayer’s expense!…

And that is the end of the séance. Children, go outside and play!