GBEVLO-LARTEY; He Has Done His Best For People And Country!

Lt. Col. Gbevlo Lartey, Ghana is proud of you!

 By Ekow Mensah

The exit of Lt. Col. Larry Gbevlo-Lartey, National Security Co-ordinator should ordinarily not have raised any eye brows.

It was to be expected when President John Dramani Mahama assumed office as Head of State after the demise of his predecessor, Professor John Evans Atta Mills.

Indeed, many of the very prominent office holders who were appointed with Gbevlo-Lartey by President Mills have been shown the exit a long time ago.

 They include heads of the Ghana Armed forces and the Police Service, the Chief of Staff, Secretary to the President and Secretary to the Cabinet.

The suprise is that Gbevlo-Lartey lasted 18 long months before the President made up his mind to send him home.

The question is, what did the President see in the retired Lt. Colonel and Cammando who has become an astute lawyer.

 Larry’s image as a no-nonsense well trained Commando was important for national security.

It put the fear of God into trouble causers who may have dreamt about engaging in activities detrimental to national cohesion.

 Larry was also a lawyer with a passionate commitment to the rule of law and respect for fundamental human rights.

 Under his watch arbitrary arrest, harassment of political opponents and detentions were reduced to the bearest minimum.

One of Larry’s strong points was that he had gained the loyalty and respect of his peers and subordinates in the security services.

They would always rally to his call and they were ready to serve him and as one major put it “take any bullet meant for him”.

Larry’s achievements as National Security Co-ordinator included the introduction of what he called “Human Security” which was nothing more than social interventions targeted at the vulnerable in society.

He moved very quickly to provide relief to flood victims and carried out emergency operations to provide portable water to schools and health facilities.

As President Mahama said on the very day he sent Larry home, he played a significant role in developing maritime security  for Ghana.

It was under his watch that the technologically advance vessel monitoring system was introduced on Ghana’s seas and beyond.

This facility will serve several countries in West Africa including Togo,  La Cote d’voire and Benin.

At the time Lt. Col. Larry Gbevlo Lartey became National Security Co-ordinator, armed robbery was on the ascendancy, cocaine smuggling was rising , what Professor Mills called “contract Killing”  had shown it s ugly head and Ghana was in a state of insecurity.

 By time he exited, Ghana had become a relatively peaceful country in which most people could go about their lawful business without hindrance.

Lt. Col. Larry Gbevlo- Lartey had done is best for his people and country.

Editorial

GBEVLO- LARTEY

After almost six years of active service as National Security Co-ordinator, Lt Col. Larry Gbevlo-Lartey (Rtd) has left office.

The Insight congratulates Col. Gbevlo-Lartey for his dedicated service to Ghana and wish him well in his future endeavours.

 As said by President Mahama, Lt. Col. Gbevlo-Lartey contributed significantly to changing the security architecture of Ghana.

 He introduced the concept of “human security” which got the security services to provided much needed services to the vulnerable in Society.

 It is indeed a great pity that this fine soldier has been compelled by circumstances both known and unknown to leave office at this time.

 It is our hope that wherever he may find himself, he will continue to make significant contributions to Ghana’s development.

ANNIVERSARY OF NKRUMAH DEATH

Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah

By Dauda Mohammed Suru

A leading member of the Socialist Forum of Ghana (SFG) and an Nkrumaist, Mr. Justice Henaku has said Ghana has further been shifted backwards because of the type of Industrial Relations Act which was recently passed to regulate the workers front.

The 2003 (Act 651) talks of democracy and pluralism in workers organization resulting in a situation in which Ghana now has the Trade Unions Congress, the Ghana Federation of Workers, Ghana National Association of Teachers, Industrial and Commercial Union of Ghana and many more and which has weakened the front of the workers movement in the country.

 According to Mr. Henaku, the introduction of the neo-liberal policies after the 1966 overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah have contributed greatly to the weakening of the trades unions in Ghana.

He warned against the signing of the Economic Partnership Agreement with the European Union and called on all Ghanaians and organized workers to stand up against the EPA with all the force they can command.

Speaking at the 42nd Anniversary lecture of the death of Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, the former Convention People Party Constituency Chairman said, the country will be flooded with businesses from the European Union including hairdressing saloons and many other small scale businesses.

The effects he argued will exacerbate the problems of unemployment, hunger and poverty in the country.

Mr. Kwesi Pratt Jr. who chaired the Lecture said the existing conditions in Ghana today result from the implementation of the Danquah-Busia ideology.

The conditions in Ghana today are that, although the country is richly endowed with mineral resources, Ghanaians do not benefit from the exploitation of those resources; through some arrangements, Multinational Corporations are entitled to keep about 98% of the benefits from Ghana’s natural resource outside of Ghana; for over the last 40 years or more Ghana has not been able to balance its budget and has to always depend on the so called development partners for support.

Mr. Kwesi Pratt used the anniversary to salute Ghanaian workers and insisted that the real rights of workers beyond the Acts of Parliament are the rights to produce and to enjoy the full benefits from the involvement of the worker in the production process.

He said the current regime does not make it possible for the worker to benefit fully from his / her participations in the production process.

He emphasized that the mortal remains of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah may be buried but his ideas live on and will continue to live on until workers and the oppressed people liberate themselves.

 According to him, the SFG celebrates the death of Dr. Nkrumah not just because he was the founder of modern Ghana but because of Nkrumah’s contributions and ideas which liberated Ghanaians and Africans from colonialism and oppression.

 On Thursday April 27th 1972, death laid its icy hands on a hero called Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in Bucharest, Romania far away from his birth place of Nkroful.

Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah joined George Padmore and others to organize the 5th Pan African Congress in Manchester in 1945 which set out to decolonize the whole of the African Continent.

Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah gave hope to black people everywhere they lived in the world and demonstrated clearly that is possible to defeat poverty and inequality.

As a result of his great contribution to the course of World’s history, the Socialist Forum of Ghana has on its calendar to remember and honor him annually.

On the occasion of the 42nd Anniversary of the Death of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the SFG on Monday April 28th held a public lecture on the theme; ‘Nkrumaism, the Rights of Workers and Economic Partnership’’ at the Freedom Center in Accra.

The lecture was attended by political activist, workers, academics, students and the general public.

CASSAVA FARMERS CRY

A cassava farmer harvests his crops

By Christian Kpesese

 Cassava farmers in the Akwapim Norh District of the Eastern Region are crying for market for their produce following what they described as the failure by the  Ministry of Food and Agriculture to honour its promise to provide ready markets in the  brewing industry for them after distributing high yielding breeds of cassava to the farmers for planting.

Mr Emmanuel Okata Amanor one of the victim`s told his story to The Insight in an interview.

According to Mr Okata, extension officers in the District introduced some high yielding cassava species to them to cultivate in order to sell their produce to a beer brewing company set up in one of the communities in the Akwapim South District but it turned out to a lie.

The farmers including Mr Okata were motivated by the promise and abondoned their traditional local cassava variety for the higher yielding species in order to produce to feed the factory in expectation of higher returns.

Mr Okata said he cultivated 5 acres of the new cassava variety which is now ready fot harvest but unfortunately for him and the other poor farmers, authoriies have informed them that, the cassava beer factory had been relocated to the Volta region and therfore there is no market for their produce.

Mr Okata expressed his dissatifaction about the development and regreted for accepting to grow the new variety.

He complained bitterly about the Ministry`s action which he discribed as betrayal of trust.

He vowed to stick to his subsistence fariming in future and never to succumb to any advise from any so called Extension Officer.

He said the lack of market for his cassava has left him with no money to care for his sick wife who has been hospitalized for some time now.

The disappointed farmers accussed MOFA of dishonesty and subsequently appealed to authorities to as a matter of urgency ensure that their investments do not go waste by finding an alternate means to buy their produce.

The Akwapim North District Director of MoFA, Mr George Gabrah confirmed the situation and said it was due to lack of communication between his office and the farmers.

According to him, the project was supposed to be on a pilot basis in order to experiment the viability of the venture.

But unfortunately, some farmers misunderstood the process and went ahead to cultivate large farms of cassava in anticipation to feed the processing factory.

 Mr Gabrah exzplained that the cassava beer factory was a mobile machine that moved from one community to another by a private company which was not a permanent structure and had to be relocated to another region.

He however assured the farmers that, his outfit would ensure that alternative market is secured for them especially in the gari processing sector.

TUC on State of Ghana's economy

TUC Boss Kofi Asamoah (L) Prez John Mahama (R)

The Secretary-General of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Mr Kofi Asamoah, has noted that all the high and low-profile corruption cases in the country are symptoms of a weak and failing state.

“The state has become deformed and unable to undertake the simple task of governing. All the high and low-profile corruption cases that have become all too pervasive are symptoms of a weak and failing state,“ he said.

In a paper titled, “Ghana’s Economy: A Concern for all”, presented at a forum organised by the Tema District Council of Labour, Mr Asamoah took on national leaders for failing to provide the kind of qualitative leadership that would have seen the state turn the circumstances of the people around.

The forum provided the TUC boss with the opportunity to perform an X-ray on the national economy, after which he warned that hopes for a better Ghana had been dwindling over many years because “the state is unable to undertake the simple task of governing”.

“We need to rescue and rehabilitate the state,“ he suggested.

Mr Asamoah prescribed some solutions that would transform the economy into a modern wealth-creating society.

“Overcoming our developmental challenges requires a skillful interplay of both the visible hand of the government and the invisible hand of the market,” he said.

Weakening state

M Asamoah indicated that as the state grew weak, it paved the way for market forces to determine economic governance in the name of laissez-faire.

“But, as history teaches us, the winds of laissez-faire are not likely to blow in the desired direction when a country is steeped in under-development.

Therefore, financial liberalisation has brought in more banks, which are announcing huge profits, but the rest of the business community is reeling under a high interest rate regime that makes domestic production almost suicidal,“ he said.

He warned that it would be extremely disastrous for the nation to stand aloof in the midst of the interplay of forces working to draw back the economy.

“A developmental state should not stand aloof; it should intervene strategically to bring down interest rates because, in the long run, this business model isn’t in the interest of anyone, including the banks themselves,” he said.

Transfer of foreign currencies

Mr Asamoah cautioned against the continuous transfer of foreign currencies out of the country, especially by companies that did not themselves generate foreign currencies.

He mentioned particularly the telecom companies which, because of the nature of their business operations, did not bring in foreign currency beyond their initial capital requirements, yet “at the same time these companies generate so much domestic revenue and they are super-profitable”.

“They are foreign owned, which also means that they need to transfer profit to their shareholders in London, Johannesburg and other foreign destinations. And they definitely cannot transfer the cedis they generate in large quantities on a daily basis. What they do is to exchange those cedis for the dollars our hardworking cocoa farmers bring in,“ he said.

Such a development, he said, had serious consequences on the growth of the cedi.

“In such a situation as we find ourselves, the grand depreciation of the cedi against all major international currencies is only a matter of course. No currency can withstand such onslaught,” he warned.

Flowing from the development, Mr Asamoah said, the measures by the Bank of Ghana to revive the ailing cedi were only a representation of panic reaction that woefully failed to tackle the symptoms.

Economic policies

He said once Ghana had pursued economic policies that gave room for “attacks” from all angles, there was bound to be challenges within the economy.

“The economic policies have led to unbridled liberalisation of the economy, made import trade super lucrative, reduced domestic production and reduced the economy to buying and selling.

The TUC boss also touched on the country’s trade deficit and attributed it to factors including foreigners’ control of the bulk of Ghana’s exports which were raw materials.

“Foreigners own the gold mines and other solid mining concerns. The Jubilee oil is over 80 per cent owned by foreign companies and it is important that these companies have been guaranteed the right to retain over 80 per cent of their earnings outside the country.

“Effectively, however, some of them keep over 90 per cent of their earnings in offshore accounts. This means that of the over 40 per cent of our export revenues that come from gold, no more than 20 per cent of that gets retained in the country,” he said.

GDP

Mr Asamoah said it was sad that the country’s policy makers kept pointing at GDP growth as a sign of national development when it was clear such growth did not contribute to employment creation.

“They are pointing to our middle-income status when they know that we have come into middle income with all the characteristics of a lower-income country, paying the lowest wage rates with deteriorating social indicators,” he said.

The worker

The TUC Secretary General observed that the difficulties confronting the Ghanaian worker had accumulated over many years and had only come to a head around this time.

Mr Asamoah said the current difficulties, challenges and crisis had come as no surprise to labour.

In a statement, the Minister of Employment and Labour Relations, Nii Armah Ashietey, called on workers in the country to support the government’s vision and commitment over the medium term to build a prosperous and equitable society in pursuance of a common goal of advancing the ‘Better Ghana’ agenda.

That vision, he said, was anchored on the commitment to put people first, a strong and resilience economy, expanding infrastructure and transparent and accountable governance.

The minister commended the workers for looking beyond their usual expectations from employers to having a dialogue on Ghana’s economy.

He extended the President’s message of congratulation in advance to all workers in Ghana, both in the formal and the informal sectors, who had contributed their best to the development of the country.

Nii Ashietey noted that the government was focused on growth within an environment of economic stability.

He explained that to the worker it meant that if stability was maintained and the positive trend continued, the government would be able to afford demands for pay increases which implied that workers’ incomes would automatically increase.

Nii Ashietey appealed to workers to exercise patience while the National Tripartite Committee worked assiduously to finalise negotiations on the new National Daily Minimum Wage.

The Chairman of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Mr P.V. Obeng, called for peaceful interchange of ideas and civil debate to achieve development.

He indicted Tema for losing its status as a port city and experiencing decline in both infrastructure and beauty.

He said the Tema Development Corporation and the Tema Metropolitan Assembly would need to form a partnership to change the face of Tema.

On the economy, Mr Obeng said Ghana was going through a crisis of transition because domestic and development partners were withdrawing support for poorer nations.

He observed that the ability to manage the crisis had created hardships.

Other speeches

The workers, in various speeches, called on the government to revamp the Tema Oil Refinery and allow it to independently work to make profit.

They also took the decision to fight against the creation of a free port at Atuabo.

THE TRANSFORMED MIND WILL DO THE TRICK

President John Dramani Mahama

In his recent state of the nation address delivered in our parliament, President John Dramani Mahama bemoaned our dependence on an import-driven economy, and exhorted all of us to go on a trajectory of economic transformation which would take us into processing locally our raw materials into finished goods, consuming what we needed and exporting the excess. This was not very different from good old Dan Lartey’s concept of domestication. At a UNIIQ 95.7 FM Science and Technology programme a resource lady, a Canadian, in a polite rebuke wondered how a country rich in gold, manganese, bauxite, diamond and timber remained poor. A minister of state in the fourth administration, commenting on the introduction of the economic partnership agreement advanced by the European Union, remarked that Ghana had no option. The current administration has shown no signs of rejecting the European diabolic scheme of confining the African-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) countries to a perpetual state of drawers of water and hewers of wood.

A cursory look at the map of the world shows clearly that all of the ACP countries from Haiti right across to Mauritius were former colonies of European countries, and that, apart from Africa, the rest of the ACP countries are predominantly inhabited by people of African descent. All ACP countries throughout their long relationship with Europe, from slave trade, slavedom through colonialism, have been reduced to the status of producing raw materials, and have provided huge markets for European manufacturers. With the emergence of other economic powers like Brazil, China and India coupled with perceived re-awakening of enlightenment among a few imaginative and visionary leaders beginning with our own Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Europe apprehends the dread of losing its stranglehold on the ACP economies.

So Europe comes along with this scheme of economic partnership agreement (EPA) telling the ACP countries:

Folks, you are moving too fast for our liking;

Stay where you are;

Continue to supply us with raw materials duty-free,

We will supply you with your industrial needs seventy percent duty-free;

And if you fancy some development for which you don’t have the capital, we will take care of it.

This is a huge insult to the sovereignty of the ACP countries. The Europeans are behaving like their forbears did to our forbears five hundred years ago, where they arm-twisted, manipulated, corrupted and coerced our ancestors to sell to them strong young men and women in exchange for pieces of calico, tobacco, brass pans, rum, smoking pipes and firearms. 

Some African countries have already compromised their national sovereignty by allowing their former colonial powers to establish military bases in their territories. Those leaders should be sufficiently percipient to know that the foreign country’s taxpayers are willing to foot the bill on the maintenance of the troops, because the latter give support to their country’s exploitative endeavours in the occupied territories. The military bases are established perpetually to secure the exploitative interests of the erstwhile colonial power.

African leaders should take a cue from the position taken by President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria who is reported to have stated that the EPA would not serve the best interest of his country; in fact, the Nigerian leader might have said that the EPA would not serve the best interest of Africa for very good reasons.

1.       The EPA would ensure securely to the advantage of the European Union the perpetuation of the current governance system in Africa where all strategic human resources are developed and mobilised to manage, administer and distribute European ideas and goods.

2.      The African businessman, who is very swift to act as an agent of the European multi-national but very slovenly to originate and create anything of his own, would be deluded into thinking that the EPA would open to him a vast opportunity of enriching himself through distributing European goods.

3.      The weak-kneed, cash-strapped African innovator would be discouraged from working at his venture by virtue of the fact that the European multi-national would be flooding the African free market with everything imaginable.

4.      The African state itself would lose the vast financial resources which otherwise would accrue to it by way of customs duties imposed on the imports.

5.      Thus, the African state would lose all the opportunity of mobilizing infrastructural development needed by African masses: railways, all-weather motorable roads, huge water-works to supply potable water.

6.      The African state would be reduced to a beggarly state; and wealthy European Union would assume the role of Father Christmas ready to dole out large doses of largesse to the African state at a price. The Good Book admonishes that the rich rule over the poor; and the borrower is the servant of the lender.

Meanwhile, from the far west an American agricultural organization is embarked on an aggressive advocacy of introducing genetically modified organisms into our country, supported to the hilt by some of our intelligentsia. Africa must be very careful of this pincer movement. The agents of neo-colonialism are quick to cite the success story of Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea. Unfortunately, the intelligentsias fail to observe that those countries have never thrown overboard their peculiar cultures which underpin their socio-cultural development. The Crop Research Institute of CSIR at Kwadaso has produced enough varieties to take care of our food security, and instead of looking outward for innovations we had better rely on our own research institutions. If parliament gives its blessings to the introduction of the genetically modified seeds, it must note that it will do an uno-cessarily disastrous disservice to our subsistence/small-scale farmers. The seeds would come with ancillary chemicals which might destroy the fertility of our soils. Where the farmers cannot afford the purchase price of the seeds, they will fail to feed the country; and the country will be held to ransome by that foreign agricultural organization. Once again, our sovereign state would be compelled to go cap in hand to beg for aid. And this is not what is to be in Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. All this is happening because we have lost the courage and pride which were instilled in us at independence; we have grown to be complacent with the colonial mentality which compels us to accept as gospel truth everything that comes from Europe, and, this time also, from America. Europe and America are holding the African mind captive. And the African mind must be emancipated and remoulded from its cultural roots.

The system which can emancipate the mind of the African from its colonial captivity is a totally radical educational reform formulated not by foreign consultants but the country’s own progressive cultural intellectuals, who have already researched into our culture. They may be found in the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Kwame Nkrumah Institute of African Studies of the University of Ghana, Legon. Foreign consultants are rejected because there is a very high level of propensity on their part to interpret every proposition from their own cultural orientation. On the contrary, the emancipated Ghanaian intellectual, who appreciates the gravity of the task, is more likely to look at all propositions from our own cultural point of view. The crux of the reform is to relate every educational endeavour to our own culture rather than the current system which was initiated by the foreign trader/administrator whose primary purpose was to exploit our human and natural resources to his advantage.

The foreign trader/administrator’s system, which he initiated nearly five hundred years ago to produce personnel with appropriate skills to serve his exploitative efforts, has not changed a wee bit. Down the corridor of times we have merely put cosmetics on it, leaving its fundamental philosophy intact. In consequence our educational institutions produce people incapable of originating or creating things. They all expect to serve in offices, or in companies engaged in import/export business, or in the professions – medicine, law, engineering. The real productive forces are the fishermen and farmers who feed us, the mine-workers who produce raw gold for export, and the cocoa farmers whose endeavours have made possible the little social and economic development that has taken place in our country. We have become disenchanted with the system, for we think we should be capable of doing more in the industrial field considering the high level of education we receive. We have not developed anything from our culture and that failure accounts for our inadequacies and mediocrities. If our education were based on our culture we would explore ourselves or our environment, examine our challenges which would inspire and urge us on to solutions. Every piece of accomplishment would propel us onto further development and thereby usher us into a civilization that is peculiar to us. We would not be placed in a situation where we would import any funny foreign thing.

Not long ago the Vice-President went to Turkey only to find out that most of the Ghanaian students, who had been sent there on government scholarship to study petroleum engineering, had converted their technical courses to administrative aspect. Such students on graduation would return here merely to stay in air-conditioned offices moving files and doing vain sanctimonious talking. Yet our country has a very wonderful, eye-opening precedent to guide us. If on his return from Fernando Po, the enterprising Tetteh Quarshie had stayed at Teshie merely to do talk-talk, we would have denied ourselves of the huge benefits from that crop. President Kufour talked about three hundred health benefits derivable from cocoa. One thought that the Ghana Cocoa Board would take the matter up and initiate a processing into a cocoa drink with which pupils in the school feeding programme would drain down their lunch meal instead of water. That kind of cocoa-drink shouldn’t cost more than fifty pesewas per pack. This would have to be coupled with sugar cane plantations to produce sugar to sweeten the sourness of the pure cocoa. That enterprise would guarantee the regulation of the quantum for export on which, as of now, some foreign organization speculates and fixes the price. By that enterprise we would influence the stabilization of the world market price which we don’t control. That enterprise would even more importantly stimulate the expansion of cocoa and sugar plantations. We are sitting on a vast potential wealth. We need an educational system based on our culture, which focuses on who we are and what nature has endowed us with which we can utilize first and foremost to our advantage, rather than getting fixated to the culture of foreigners, which the current educational system securely ensures, deepening our dependency syndrome.

The radical educational reform we envisage is not a one-time event which people may gladly forget about after the event, but a long ten-to-fifteen year sustained process of education which will be given the opportunity to churn out a totally new generation of professional teachers to teach in our schools. A totally new generation of professional teachers, in the sense that the Ghanaian-African culture will take centre stage around which all educational efforts revolve. The Ghana-African culture does not consist of the drumming, singing and dancing which we observe on durbar grounds on festive occasions; they are mere manifestations of our culture which consists in the totality of our very livelihood: birth and death, marriage, kinship relationships, religious beliefs, customary practices, taboos, occupations ( blacksmithing, goldsmithing, hunting, farming, fishing, salt-making, trading), arts and crafts, governance systems, health(medicine), environmental security and protection, language, norms and values. These and other aspects related to them are the factors that influence the heart-beat of the soul. 

The ideology that kept the society going and resilient, bouncing back even in very hard times and sustained it was, like our unwritten history, never formulated or articulated. Nevertheless it was there, inherent in unconscious harmonious co-existence among different clans occupying the same territorial space. Certain non-African societies, when they came into contact with European adventurers who overworked them, were very nearly wiped out. Some unknown diseases introduced by the Europeans, killed thousands of those non-African societies.

We are yet to explore why the very places where the slave trade was at its height are the very ones that have large population densities. The ideology that dictates the norms, spiritual and moral values which influence the behaviour of a robust and vibrant people cannot be said to be a bad one; and it is this ideology that should inform our determination of a philosophy of education completely different from the bankrupt one inherited from the colonialists. We need a total volte-face. At the risk of repetition, the European trader/administrator introduced an educational system, the philosophy of which was to capacitate the African to help him exploit the human and natural resources of the continent. That philosophy has been perpetuated to this day, alerting the African psyche toward European ideas and goods to the forfeiture, at enormous cost, of his own cultural heritage. We must go back to our cultural heritage.

The ideological basis of the livelihood of the African consisted of his concern and consideration for his kin and clan. In an era where people lived in villages and small towns it was easily extended to any traveler to the village or town; for the very first question the stranger answered was about where he came from and the clan he belonged to. He was sent to the head of the family to which his own home family was related, for the belief was that his family and the host family originated from the one and same ancestry. So he was a family man and no stranger at all. He was a brother, son or uncle as the case might be. These days such practical terrific hospitality can hardly be accorded; nevertheless, the spiritual and moral values are still pervasive in our societies; and our education should reflect these wonderful spiritual and moral values; for they make for harmonious, peaceful existence in all situations.

There are, however, other manifestations of our culture which are intolerable: widowhood rites, witches’ camps, Trokosi, human trafficking, female genital mutilation, child labour, etc etc. we do not go through a systematic process of psychical transformation only to succumb to satanic habits of sheer wickedness. This seemy side of our life, including corruption and bribery, need not be swept under the carpet in the name of tradition. It must be integrated in our school curriculum, where the educator and educand debate it thoroughly in hopes of changing people’s attitudes to life for good where people begin to see the relevance of school academic endeavours to real life situations. This kind of exercise is going to help us refocus our attention on our social environment and set us thinking as to how we can improve and maintain and protect it. Secondly and more importantly it will help us onto developing a scientific turn of mind which meticulously looks at everything and narrows down to rational decisions, instead of depending on irrational superstitions, which almost invariably goads men on to irrational and wicked behaviour.

Our socio-ideo-cultural framework affords us a philosophy of education, humanism, completely different from that which we inherited from the colonialists. The colonialists’ purpose of coming to Africa was to exploit the human and natural resources of the continent; and they achieved their aim by establishing appropriate institutions and systems, legal, administrative and educational the last of which was the most insidious in the sense that the educational system they instituted has held the mind of the African captive to this day, unenervated the African of originality and initiative and creativity. The captive mind loses its confidence and the man’s behaviour is riddled with loose, dispointed and unco-ordinated reactions which are characteristics of diffidence.

The humanistic educational system based on our African culture is the kind that takes into account through reason the African challenges. Reason is the function and product of the mind; and the mind that is already held captive by a foreign cultural ideology is in itself the greatest challenge. So, the vast majority of the African intelligentsia who are the nominal rulers of Africa today and beneficiaries of the bankrupt colonial educational system are themselves the most serious stumbling block to any radical educational reform advocacy. The African intellectual or technocrat is as brilliant as any intellectual or technocrat anywhere; yet his brilliance does not readily translate into putting the African challenges in the African cultural perspective, for he soon introduces other foreign comparisons which bear very little or no relevance at all to the African situation. His thought processes do not relate; hence the challenges he perceives remain unresolved. The African intelligentsia ought to be thoroughly African culturally to be able to relate to their own background to the extent of having the capacity to identify the challenges and offer the appropriate remedial measures. The key to the African identity and personality concept consists in our conscious determination to study our languages critically right from the kindergarten through the tertiary level. The detractors argue that this course of action will deepen the sharp differences that already exist between the various tribes in the country and that it will create barriers to communication, with the result that it will sow seeds of disunity. Differences there will always be and make for the beauty of our country. The English language which, by historical accident, has become our lingua franca will still be studied with a certain degree of intensity and that will facilitate free communication between people of diverse linguistic background. Moreover, it is a lesser evil to devote adequate time seriously to study your own mother tongue and think in it than to spend the better part of your school hours on a foreign language. That must be the cup of tea for those who wish to be expert at that language. In the beginning of the twentieth century good old Archie Casely-Hayford wished he could establish a university not on out adulterated coastal area, but somewhere in Asante, with a Chair devoted to the study and development of our dialects. The brainy Dr. J. B. Danquah for all the philosophy he studied of Europe’s luminaries highly appreciated the philosophy inherent in the maxims of our dialects. Himself a deep thinker and builder, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah would have provided substance for the concept of African identity and personality by the educational aspect of the seven-year development plan which was abandoned at his overthrow.

We speak of restoring our confidence and asserting ourselves by a radical educational reform based on our culture; and language is key to the expression of our African identity and personality. There is no question of paucity of learning materials; for the Bureau of Ghana Languages (BGL) has them and will have to produce more. The BGL and the Curriculum Research and Development Division (CRDD) in collaboration with local linguistic consultants from our premier University of Ghana will work out workbooks to go with the textbooks. Dialects which are widely spoken in specific areas of our country: Asante Twi, Akwapim Twi, Dagaare, Dagbani, Ewe, Fante, Ga-Dangme, Gonja, Nzema and Sissala will give the BGL and CRDD more than enough to bite. However, since the entire reform programme is scheduled to go through a gestation period of ten-to-fifteen years, the two organizations will have to go at it piecemeal and with due diligence. Meanwhile the existing thirty-eight colleges of education will have to be expanded and many more built. Funding will be by the central government through annual budgetary allocation with possible grants from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNECSO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). A programme of this description is very likely to stimulate keen interest in the study of our dialects with the consequential effect of arousing further interest in poetry, drama, music, drumming and dancing in a perfectly co-ordinated school curricular activity. It is expected that our universities will include Ghanaian languages among their admission requirements in virtue of their corporate responsibility to produce true Ghanaian citizenry.

The study of the English language will still be vigorously pursued inasmuch as we have to communicate with the outside world, seeing that we have not as yet developed our own local language to an acceptable international level. The only limitation to the English language study is our insistence of excluding from our literature of English setbooks those books which are peculiarly English; for example, Shakespeare’s works, Charles Dickens’ works, Jane Austen’s works, Thomas Hardy’s works etc. etc. About this time there are hundreds of works by Africans whose works tell the African experience which should engage our attention, exploring and probing. They are too many to acknowledge here: Professor Kofi Awoonor, Professor Ama Atta Aidoo, Professor Anyidoho, Professor Ayi Kwei Armah, Kobina Sekyi, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Peter Abrahams, Attuquaye Okai, Senghor and many many more. Our university dons, competent media houses and intellectuals should tear these works into bits and pieces to find out their philosophical, sociological and other social underpinnings which relate to the African. This kind of exercise will set us on to building up a repertoire of erudition comparable anywhere We will be talking to the world from peculiarly African point of view.

Another subject in the curriculum which it is compelling to study seriously is African history. Our reform based on our culture is to make a true African of the student, a true African who by virtue of the education he gets looks closely at the challenges and boldly takes the initiative to solve them rather than remain inept, playing the blame game and passing the buck. Right from the kindergarten through the tertiary the African child studies the past of his own people – district, regional, national, sub-African regional through the continental level such that he begins to identify himself with the experiences of the continent. The cognitive skills he acquires through the long process of systematic and graded orientation imbues him with psycho-historical perspective of the continent which is lacking in the present educational system; for the latter seems to be rather more concerned with the historical experiences of foreign countries which are not critically relevant to Africa.

The historical perspective affords the African a precedent to guide his strategic planning and programming. He just doesn’t jump on to accepting ideas, particularly, of those erstwhile European colonialists who are still exploiting the human and natural resources with collaborative support of their African agents. A typical example is related to the divided opinion on the economic partnership agreement. You can be sure that the so-called businessmen are ready to support our country signing the agreement, because they will have a field day in acting as managers to import, administer and distribute goods from Europe. They care less about developing our own productive capacities. Similarly, there are others who are not in the least ambivalent about the genetically modified seeds advocacy. The institution which should advise the government to kick against the GMO is CSIR. It is unfortunate it is not doing so. Its own departments are working hard, producing varieties best suited to our environment, which can be distributed more cheaply to our farmers. It would seem the CSIR is suffering from some myopic conditions as the EPA advocates. A little historical perspective would inform them to kick against the EPA and GMO. Do not encourage neo-colonialism: Do not encourage the perpetuation of evil arising out of greed.

If the study of history affords the student psycho-historical perspective which enables him strategically to plan and programme his activity, that of geography stimulates a careful study of his environment – the land, climate, natural resources, human resources and how man utilizes to his advantage what nature has endowed him with. Once again, it is a futile exercise to waste your precious years in education studying other climes than yours. You end up fixated to what is irrelevant to your own environment; and you begin to think that everything must be imported. The African must know thoroughly the natural resources, how he can exploit them and how he can utilize them to advance the development of his culture. The African must begin to think deeply about what mechanical devices he can design best suited to his environment, instead of rushing to other climes to purchase what the latter have designed primarily to meet their own challenges. Our ancestors did very well to preserve the primitivity of our environment by creating Nanaanom Mpow. Today, in the name of getting almighty foreign exchange we have desecrated and destroyed some of them, felling the hardwood for export, and creating deforestation with dire environmental consequences. When we were young we used to see plenty of silk cotton trees all along the coastal region; today they are no more; and we are paying a heavy price for our indifferent attitudes and virtual criminal negligence. Apparently, we are only consumers, not builders. In the name of development people are building in waterways and marshlands the latter of which nature in its infinite wisdom has provided to absorb flood waters. When their property gets flooded and devastated, then they turn to the tax-payer to go to their aid. Such undisciplined and unprincipled people must not be encouraged to perpetuate their folly. A thorough study of geography and rational application of its concepts are essential educational activity in the curriculum.

Mathematics and the sciences, including agricultural science, some people think, must be given more attention because they are key to the development of technology; but let us sound a note of caution; life as we live it, is not comparted into sciences and humanities, exclusive of each other. They are dynamic in the life we live. So it is left to us to reduce the concepts to the understanding of the average pupil/students. Mathematical concepts which used to be the preserve of second-cycle school academic exercise are now taught at the primary level. The African child should be sufficiently educated to know the flora and fanna in the environment, their natural habitat and how and why we should preserve them, their impact on the eco-system. Chemistry and physics as taught in our institutions should relate to our life, how our life is inexorably influenced by the combination of these factors and how we can explain things in terms of how the laws of the sciences impact on our life. This way we will forever do away with superstitions. Physics and chemistry should fire our imagination and arouse our phantasies which in normal conditions should drive our students into playful experimentation exercises. Students will no longer be indifferent to things observed in their environment, but will meticulously analyze those things with the determination to find out the causes and effects. It won’t be a matter of witches and wizards. Instead of allowing foreigners to cultivate in us a taste for their industrial goods just as we have done with respect to their ideas, we ourselves should grow and develop a culture of scientific enquiry, having regard to what we are endowed with in the continent. A typical example is we have been talking about the possibility of tapping energy from the sun which we have in plenty, seeing the largest part of our continent lies within the tropics, it is just talk, talk. Meanwhile, foreigners are currently selling to us solar lamps and solar panels. Our engineers should have initiated a programme of producing those items, for it is a lucrative business. I am even persuaded to believe that we could tap the solar power and develop it into kinetic energy for use in automobiles, thus relieving ourselves and the whole world of the imminent disaster of ozone-layer depletion. Inventions are exhaustible; and we could make a name for African ingenuity if we applied our mind to making it. African technology is possible, a technology that dissolves the challenges of man.

Agricultural science, like the foregoing, should predispose the African into finding ways and means of meeting squarely the challenges of his livelihood. The traditional practices, like shifting cultivation, cannot cope with our expanding populations. The tools we have inherited form our ancestors cannot adequately help us to meet the challenges of our time. The land tenure system does not encourage the entrepreneur into venturing into agriculture which is extremely lucrative in the sense that man needs food everyday. We need agricultural engineers to design all-weather irrigation works suited to our environment, not consultants who sit in air-conditioned pushing the pen. We need agricultural engineers who can design workable tools other than cutlasses and hoes which will relieve our farmers of back-breaking pains. The weedicides are making our farm and garden plots barren, for they are not only destroying the weeds we don’t like, but they are also destroying other organisms, like worms, whose under-soil activities help maintain soil fertility. Businessmen are doing brisk business, importing out-board motors for our canoes which our ancestors designed centuries ago. Their business does not translate into designing better craft other than the dug-out canoes. The compound of cow dung and the droppings of poultry, sheep, pigs, goats and dead leaves could be processed into organic manure for our farms instead of relying on chemical fertilizers imported and distributed at great cost to the Ghanaian tax-payer. At a certain place my art teacher taught me that nothing went waste as a discard; for the artist could make something beautiful of a piece of dead wood, etc. The hue and cry about the Fulani herdsmen’s menace to crop farms and to human life as well could be minimized through the creation of ranches and development of appropriate feed for the herds not by the Ghanaian tax-payer but by the owners themselves. They are rich enough to own hundreds of herds; the Fulani herdsmen are mere technocrats hired by the actual owners to render services. The latter provide the hired technocrats with the necessary facilities to do their job. The owners, therefore, should be vicariously held responsible for the menace. Ranches would take the herds off our crop farms and induce research into the appropriate herbiage as feed for the herds. That project would advance among us an improved culture of animal husbandry. The same could be said of sheep, goats and pigs. The mix of the waste of all these animals and dead leaves could be processed into organic manure, thus putting back into our soils what we have taken out of them. You can imagine the number of jobs that will be created!

As regards the study of government, once again, the focus should be on our culture, easily intelligible to our people and capable of growth and development. Imperialism and colonialism did not permit the African to grow and develop the governance system with its institutions. Instead, the two isms made use of the little we had developed to advance their own exploitative interest. The European instituted legislative, administrative and judicial systems fuelled by an educational system which took no account of African culture. At independence any African leader who pursued any system other than that which the imperialists had established was blacklisted, although the leader’s new system might conform to African traditions. And the imperialists who still had their agents around supported by a lot of the local intelligentsia used subtle means to destabilize our governments. Students of government should closely apply their minds to the traditions we had prior to the imposition of systems alien to us. Some European travellers to Africa in the eighteenth century marvelled at the genuine, down-to-earth democracy being practised in Asante. It was an African genius of statecraft which produced that admirable practical democracy. Today, people are touting a type of democracy which is at variance with the type we had; and since colonial times we have neither been practising it nor carefully researching it; we tend to think that it is only the former colonialists who know what democracy is.

Democracy was growing in African kingdoms and would probably have developed into multi-partisan had not European imperialism and colonialism set in. Currently in Ghana there is multi-partisan democracy working at the national, but at the local government level where it matters most there is no genuine democracy; for the institution that sets the agenda for local government is the party in power at the national level; and it is the Chief Executive who appoints the chief executive for the local; the endorsement by the district assembly only gives it a semblance of democratic action, but it is not democratic. This dichotomy can be removed by instituting a democratic process of electing the chief executive.

There are other issues that detract from the smooth working of the governance system particularly where the Minister of Justice doubles also as the Attorney-General. Some people are advocating the separation of the two offices, so that the Attorney-General becomes an independent public officer not subject to the dictates of the Executive. The Constitutional diktat that the Executive should appoint a majority of its ministers from among the Parliamentarians makes mockery of the overarching supervisory role of the National Assembly. The President cannot do otherwise than what the Constitution dictates. To do otherwise would constitute a violation of the Constitution and the President could be impeached on that score.

In regard to economics, vocational and technical education, our culture, inasmuch as they relate to our livelihood, should once again take the centre stage. The crux of the matter is to re-orient the mind of our students to our own resources and think out what we can do with the wonderful resources to our advantage, instead of, as of now, our predisposition to ignore them and jump onto a buying spree from other cultures. This tendency is not helping us in any way. A renowned scientist at a science and technology programme of the UNIIQ FM 95.7 remarked not long ago that what the hand could do the machine could do. This is the compelling reason why our voc-tech students should combine seriously the study of the sciences with voc-tech. The economics student may be aware that these days our well-to-do do tiling in their houses; and the tiles are being imported from Italy. The businessman care less about the negative impact his transaction makes on the value fluctuation of our cedi. Yet the clay which is the major material in tile manufacturing abounds plentifully in our country. We need a generation of transformed mind to change the trend of our thought processes from dependency on imported goods and ideas to home-grown ideas and goods. Workshops and seminars won’t do the job. It is only a radical education reform that can produce the transformed mind; and the transformed mind can and will do the trick.

In the programme we are advocating sports and games play very significant role, first, in the sense that together with good nutrition they help develop a healthy body and fight off diseases. Secondly, they help inculcate in the individual certain virtues mere moral suasion cannot provide. Discipline is taught in real practical terms: at the sound of the umpire’s whistle, the player has to act accordingly. Team spirit encourages the development of team work; and this is demonstrated clearly in how balls are passed from one player to another on the same side to a vantage point where the striker scores a goal. At basketball, hockey and football it is a beauty to observe this team spirit at work. Mental alertness is developed, for within a split second the player has to make a decision whether to pass the ball or go for glory himself. Friendships are created: despite the competitive nature of sports and games these days players on the same side readily hug those on the other side and sometimes exchange jerseys. It teaches aesthetics: you just watch the high jumper or the pole-vaulter, how at the posts they swirl their bodies and gracefully land on the other side on their backs, or how the hurdler with his trunk thrust forward together with one leg outstretched whilst the other leg negotiates neatly over the hurdle. All sports and games are to be incorporated in the school curriculum and pursued with all enthusiasm and zeal. A few may make a profession of it as some have already done and earn their living. It is paying for a whole nation to have a healthy citizenry without spending overmuch on medical bills.

The Ghanaian, the African, believes in God and knows that he has been created by God. Within one week of the birth of a baby, the family, including members of the extended family, and a few friends in neighbourhood gather together to give the baby a name. Almost invariably an elder from the father’s family performs the rites. Potable water and an alcoholic drink are provided. Meanwhile, the baby has been bathed and dressed in some new beautiful clothes. The elder takes the baby on his laps and prays a short prayer unto God Almighty and the earth and significantly the spirits of the family’s dead ancestors in the belief that life is a continuum between the living and the dead and that there is an unbroken spiritual connect between them; indeed, it is believed that the spirits of the ancestors have great influence on the lives of the living. The elder dips his forefinger in the alcoholic drink and tips it on the baby’s tongue simultaneously pronouncing his name given by the father, and says Nsa a nsa three times. He repeats the same thing with the potable water, in the belief that the baby will become a truthful and honest member of the community. Gifts are given to the baby; and from that time forth as he grows he is constantly exhorted and reminded to behave according to the strong character of the elder, dead or alive, after whom he was named in the first place. At death, the soul of the deceased is believed to join those of his ancestors on the other side of the world.

With the advent of Islam, Christianity and other religions some of our cultural practices have changed remarkably. However, there are certain elements that African religion shares in common with the universal religions – belief in God Almighty and the moral uprightness which God Almighty demands of all mankind. The African can acknowledge the Christian belief in the sinful nature of man, the manifestations of which are there for all to see, and consequently man’s separation form God’s glory. God Almighty is all-love, in his infinite wisdom and love then sends His son, Lord Jesus Christ, to our earth to reconcile us to Himself by the supreme sacrifice on the cross at Calvary. And by that ultimate sacrifice the believer has direct access to God through the only intercessor of the world, the Lord Jesus Christ. Is the any reason why the African should approach God Almighty through the spirits of his dead ancestors? Salvation is at hand; and the African lives not to man but to God Almighty and his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. To do otherwise is a curse. The African must therefore disconnect the spiritual connect he had with his ancestral spirits and refocus on that Great Mind Who created this world and furthermore establish by His power a more lasting spiritual connect with Him through daily obedience to His commands, statutes, precepts, testimonies and judgments.

The African must note that after his creation consisting of everything that man needed, God Almighty’s last creation was man in his own image and after His likeness; in other words He prepared for man’s sustenance and livelihood everything. And He gave this life-sustaining earth to man commanding him with His very first command “Manage it.” God Almighty did not command man to subject himself to the whims and caprices of any other man. It is anathema to God that the African placed right at the centre of this earth, where God has put in enormous resources far greater than obtainable anywhere else should subject himself to any man on this earth. The African must therefore rediscover himself by steadfastly getting closer to his Maker, establishing the spiritual connect and feeding on that Great Mind and continually seeking of His knowledge, understanding and wisdom.

In conclusion, the African mind has been held captive by foreign traders/administrators who set up an educational system to produce personnel with appropriate skills and techniques suited to their exploitation of the African human and natural resources. That system must be radically changed with the view of transforming the mind of the African so that he can rediscover himself and acknowledge his African identity and personality. One of the potent tools to this transformation is the African language with its related subsets of poetry, drama, music, drumming and dancing. Thinking in his own language within the context of his own culture, the African will begin to discern the challenges his culture poses. The educational authorities need not hasten to transform the existing system all at once. They need ten-to-fifteen years to formulate policies, programmes and projects which should begin with the colleges of education, so that the latter can produce professional teachers of transformed mind to do the job. Meanwhile the universities will have to re-align their academic and research activities to challenges of our culture. The dons need not entertain any dread of fall in their career advancement; on the contrary if they do it very well, they will be sought after as consultants on genuine African culture by other jurisdictions. That will be Africa’s contribution to the advancement of world knowledge. The African will begin to grow and develop his own culture. He will regain his self-confidence and assert his personality anywhere. We need not sweep under the carpet the challenge ahead: the beneficiaries – the intelligentsia – will oppose the reform we are advocating because they are complacent about the existing system, and the agents of the erstwhile colonialists will be parading the corridors of power to offer seemingly harmless options in an attempt to retain the status quo. Only a transformed mind through a radical education reform will help us rediscover ourselves as a people of distinct cultural identity and personality capable of holding our own and speaking eyeball to eyeball with others of different cultures.

         Peter M. Onumah

21 Presby Street – Dome

      24^th April, 2014

Only the Synagogue Can Save You

T.B Joshua

Every week, thousands of people attend a megachurch in Lagos. But they aren’t there for the sermons -- they believe the televangelist pastor can cure them of HIV, cancer, and other terrible diseases.

By Rowan Moore Gerety

On any given weekend, one of Africa's largest concentrations of cancer patients, people living with AIDS, sufferers of strokes, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, asthma, epilepsy, abscesses, ulcers, severe burns, infertility, sickle cell anemia, and hypertension can be found in the Prayer Line at the Synagogue, Church of All Nations, in the Ikotun-Egbe section of Lagos, Nigeria. Rising from a warren of cinder-block and sheet-metal houses, the Synagogue is a hulking, faux-Gothic megachurch with blue-tinted windows and a concrete facade sculpted to look like the stonework in a castle. A cluster of police and suits with earpieces guards the entrance, tucked behind an ornate wrought-iron fence nearly 20 feet high and bordered by a long row of royal palms and international flags.

Early in the morning every Thursday and Sunday, thousands of people with chronic, debilitating medical conditions congregate under large white tents across the street. One by one, they present their medical certificates to church ushers as part of a winnowing process that culminates in a group of about 200 worshippers evenly spaced along both sides of a passageway at one end of the church's main hall. Each patient holds a large white placard describing his or her illness. Some placards have been filled in by hand with permanent marker; others, such as those for patients with HIV/AIDS, cancer, or diabetes, are common enough that the church has already had them printed in bold red block letters, easily legible to a TV audience.

This is the headquarters of Temitope Balogun Joshua, a flamboyant 50-year-old televangelist, with a neat goatee and, on filming days, a thick layer of foundation on his face. His prophesies of world events (the death of Michael Jackson, the Costa Concordia disaster) and claims of miraculous medical cures have earned him a following far beyond Nigeria. Since 2004, when Nigeria's National Broadcasting Commission banned "unverified miracles" from public television, T.B. Joshua, as he is known, has broadcast across Africa on his own network, Emmanuel TV. His loyal audience includes soccer players, movie stars, and heads of state past and present, from Ghana, Gabon, Malawi, the Central African Republic, and Congo (Brazzaville). When Air Zimbabwe announced direct flights between Harare and Lagos in January 2013, the headline on New Zimbabwe's website was "Air Zimbabwe targets TB Joshua pilgrims." In October, I sat behind Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe's former prime minister, at the church as other worshippers in a crowd of some 15,000 waved souvenir flags from South Africa, Botswana, Equatorial Guinea, Senegal, and Cameroon.

But most visitors to the church are poor people in search of help for their pain and suffering.

Indeed, poverty has fueled T.B. Joshua's practice.

With limited access to doctors and facing rising costs of care, some suffering from severe illnesses are turning to faith healing as a last resort.

With limited access to doctors and facing rising costs of care, some suffering from severe illnesses are turning to faith healing as a last resort. For others, however, the promise of miracles that pervades so many African churches has made places like Synagogue their primary or even their first stop for help. A dozen doctors I spoke with in and around Lagos voiced concerns that their patients were interrupting or deferring orthodox treatment altogether in favor of the divine. Recent research from several African countries confirms the problem. One survey of perceptions of cancer found that more than a quarter of Nigerian nurses view going "to a prayer house" as an appropriate response to a breast cancer diagnosis. In Uganda, researchers found that a belief in "divine healing" led some AIDS patients to stop taking antiretroviral drugs. And in Ghana, the practice of "healer shopping" -- seeking spiritual cures alongside medical treatment -- has been tied to increased complications among people with diabetes.

In the Prayer Line at the church, I met a woman who had planned her visit after being diagnosed with breast cancer. "Why would I go to a hospital," she asked me, "when I know there is a supernatural power who will heal me?"

Pentecostal and so-called charismatic churches, where faith healing is most widely practiced, now account for more than 500 million believers worldwide, concentrated in Africa and Latin America. Taken together, they represent the fastest-growing segment of global Christianity. (Spiritual healing is practiced in many U.S. churches, too, but because American health care is far more accessible, faith healing rarely supplants conventional medical treatment.)

In Nigeria, many churches like T.B. Joshua's deliver a message that can be read as a response to the shortcomings of a costly, patchwork health-care system: Seek spiritual healing first, and medical treatment only if all else fails. That logic, as one Lagos oncologist told me, is an important reason that around three-quarters of cancer patients in Nigeria show up at the hospital for the first time only when the diagnosis is terminal, or close to it. "And that's the tip of the iceberg," he said. "Most people won't come to the hospital at all." 

* * * 

I met Ikechukwu Nwana, a driver from Nigeria's Anambra state who has diabetes, on the front porch of one of several dozen makeshift motels that dot the neighborhood of mud streets and tiny shops behind the Synagogue, a spoke industry spawned by the weekly influx of pilgrims. Nwana was in his early 40s, with the set jaw and downcast stare of a person in severe pain. He was so thin that he appeared much taller than his 6-foot-2-inch frame.

Nwana's troubles started four years ago, when he began getting up to urinate in the middle of the night -- first twice, then three, four, and five times before dawn over the course of a few months. He took ground-up leaves and roots prescribed by a local traditional healer, but his condition did not improve. At a hospital in January 2010, a doctor said he was at risk for diabetes, prescribed insulin injections he couldn't afford, and told him to give up a diet of starchy cassava and yam in favor of beans and ripe plantains. When Nwana began to experience blurred vision and faulty balance as he walked, he returned to the hospital a second time and scrounged up enough money to pay for insulin. The treatment practically bankrupted him: A month's worth of insulin injections ate up more than half his $250 salary. As a father of four, he often had to forgo medication in order to pay for groceries and school fees. 

With frequent interruptions in treatment, Nwana's blood sugar levels tripled over time, and he began to lose weight. There were days when he couldn't get out of bed. His own pastor, an Anglican, came to say prayers at his bedside. Later, members of his wife's congregation, the Deeper Life Bible Church, prayed over him as well. Nothing worked.

Spurred on by his brother Ejike, Nwana began to watch DVDs of T.B. Joshua on Emmanuel TV. Ejike carried a T.B. Joshua sticker in his back pocket at all times for good luck, and he was certain the anointing water he'd gotten on his last trip to the Synagogue had been instrumental in helping him sell his house at a good price. On TV, the acolytes who narrated T.B. Joshua's exorcism and faith cures during the Prayer Line told viewers to reach out and touch their television screens, that "space and time are no boundary for the healing power of Jesus Christ." But when his brother's diabetes persisted, Ejike thought it would be best for Nwana to come to the church itself. So they took a 10-hour bus ride to Lagos.

Nwana squinted in the sun and told me they had been there a week so far, without being able to take part in the Prayer Line -- there were simply too many people. Ejike was convinced that this, like his brother's diabetes, was the result of inherited sins. Before the family became Christian, he said, "our father worshipped idols." Nwana himself was circumspect but hopeful about his prospects at the church. "I believe I will be healed," he said.

* * * 

In 1991, Aderemi Ajekigbe, an oncologist at Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), home to West Africa's oldest cancer treatment facility, published a survey of the reasons breast cancer patients gave for coming to the hospital long after they first felt breast lumps. One in eight, the survey found, cited a "preference for prayer houses or spiritual healing homes." Nearly a quarter reported that they had been to "native doctors or herbalists," who were generally seen as treating the spiritual causes underlying physical illness -- and often at a price cheaper than that for hospital-based care. (Many women in Ajekigbe's study also acknowledged "economic reasons" for delaying their first hospital visit.)

Today, Ajekigbe said in an interview, "It's just as bad as it was 23 years ago. It's even getting worse." He now directs cancer treatment at LUTH and sees 15 to 20 new patients a day pass through his department. The vast majority of them come too late for him to be of much help. When I visited Ajekigbe at LUTH's radiotherapy department in the fall of 2013, he directed the receptionist to show me photographs of cancer patients at the time of their first visit to the hospital. The receptionist handed me a thick brown paper envelope with pictures that told stories of enormous suffering. In one, a young woman stared at the camera with a gaping, pus-filled cavity between her eyes. The next showed a man in his 40s whose jaw and teeth had been halfway consumed by a large tumor. And on: a man, naked on a hospital bed, his back, buttocks, and genitals covered with blistering lesions; a woman's upper body, her swollen left breast only partly concealing a festering wound the size of a baseball in her rib cage. Among patients whose illness is diagnosed only at autopsy at LUTH -- people who die in the ambulance or the emergency room -- cancer killed nearly one in 10.     

"When people have cancer or any suspicion of cancer," Ajekigbe told me, "the No. 1 belief is that it's [caused by] witchcraft.

Patients think orthodox doctors deal with the physical aspects of illness, and native doctors and the others [pastors] deal with the spiritual aspects.

Patients think orthodox doctors deal with the physical aspects of illness, and native doctors and the others [pastors] deal with the spiritual aspects. So when you think you're bewitched..." He trailed off with a sigh.

Nearly every physician I spoke to in Nigeria tied spiritual remedies for chronic illnesses to the uphill battle patients fight to access and pay for orthodox medical treatment. As it did for Nwana, the cost of medication can easily overwhelm a household budget, so people look for help elsewhere. "People believe in the alternative medicine; they believe in the churches," Ajekigbe said. "But this belief may also have to do with how much you have in your pocket. I'm telling you this, even doctors cannot afford cancer care in this country."

Since Nigerian hospitals introduced fees for service in the 1980s, the costs of medical treatment have multiplied. In a paper on family health budgets, sociologist I.O. Orubuloye and his co-authors describe a clinic where he has done research since the mid-1970s that "had, in 1974, every bed filled and long queues of outpatients. Sixteen years later it was almost deserted and doctors and nurses reported that their potential patients had 'run away' because of the expense.... They believed that the patients were attempting home cures or had turned to the traditional medical system or to the faith-healing churches."

Complicating matters is the abysmal state of Nigeria's health-care infrastructure. At the time of my visit, resident doctors at public hospitals went on strike for three weeks to protest unpaid salaries. Only a few of the country's seven radiotherapy centers were up and running, due to equipment failures at the others.

Managing diabetes consumed more than half of Nwana's wages; cancer treatment can cost 10 times as much. "There is no insurance company that covers it," Ajekigbe said. "What you do here is cost-sharing: Members of the family, nuclear and extended, friends, maybe your social club, or the church you belong to help in contributing the money to buy the drugs."

But often, they contribute money to buy something other than drugs. With the help of his brother and his wife, Nwana marshaled $350 -- equivalent to more than two months of insulin treatment -- for his trip to T.B. Joshua's church. Another man I met waiting to enter the Prayer Line at the church worked as a security guard at a provincial hospital. He lifted his shirt to show me an infected wound that had never quite healed in the years since a car accident in 2006. He had already had two unsuccessful operations to remove the infection, and when he approached relatives to pay for a third, his brother-in-law was happy to help: "He said, 'The best thing for you to do is to come to Lagos and see my pastor.'" 

* * *

T.B. Joshua's work is not without controversy -- even among fellow faith leaders. He is considered an outcast by many of his peers, not for promulgating false promises, but rather for coloring outside the lines of bona fide Christianity. He has been barred from the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria and the Christian Association of Nigeria, and he has been publicly rebuffed by Pastor Enoch Adeboye, leader of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Nigeria's largest Pentecostal movement.

Yet the difference between T.B. Joshua and more mainstream Pentecostal and charismatic pastors is mainly one of degree. Miracles and televised testimonials of faith healing are staples of Adeboye's own church, as they are at places with names like Deeper Life, Christ Embassy, Celestial Church of God, Mountain of Fire and Miracles, and dozens of others. Although only a few would go so far as to publicly claim curing of AIDS, the core message to believers is the same: There is nothing God will not do.

T.B. Joshua has also courted criticism outside Nigeria. In 2011, the BBC named T.B. Joshua in an investigation into the deaths of three HIV-positive African women living in London, alleging that he and several other pastors discouraged them from taking antiretrovirals. But the response from the pulpit was swift, confident, and smug. "I know many of you ... might have heard a lot about T.B. Joshua [in] the United Kingdom, some newspaper," he mused on Emmanuel TV the week after the investigation aired. "[It is a] campaign of calumny. Slanderous remarks. Name-callers.... As for me, my household, and Synagogue family, we are using medicine."

Indeed, T.B. Joshua has been careful, particularly in his public appearances, not to present the use of faith healing as an alternative to orthodox medicine. At the church, though, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that T.B. Joshua's preaching gives his followers exactly such a choice. As a Cameroonian man told me in a nearby lodge, "The Synagogue is a big spiritual hospital."

One ironclad requirement of the Prayer Line is that patients present medical certificates attesting to their illnesses. On the one hand, having a doctor's imprimatur enhances the drama of T.B. Joshua's healing touch. But the certificates also offer hard proof of the limitations of orthodox medicine: What the hospital cannot cure, the certificates suggest to viewers of Emmanuel TV, God certainly will.

During the long wait for the Prayer Line, I met a woman named Ese Okoro who had come to the church from Nigeria's Delta state. She bore a letter from her doctor: "To Whom It May Concern, Medical Report Re: Okoro, Ese. A known case of seizure disorder who has been on treatment on several occasions here in General Hospital, Ekpan, Delta State.... She has visited hospital, tradomedical homes and religious homes no improvement noticed. We are reffering [sic] to you for treatment support." Another man told me he'd tested positive for HIV twice, four years apart, each time in anticipation of a visit to the church. In between, he'd treated the illness with T.B. Joshua's anointing water, a "complimentary" gift the church includes with $40 packages of T.B. Joshua's books and DVDs, which are sold at every service.

* * * 

"Wherever there be darkness in your bones, tendons, fluids, muscles," T.B. Joshua told his congregation, "let there be light." It was closing in on 3 p.m., and the Sunday service had been going on for nearly eight hours. But T.B. Joshua looked like he was just getting started. Wearing trim black slacks and a checkered button-down shirt, he paced rapidly to and fro behind a sky blue podium as he led the room in prayer. "Satan is the author of sickness, disease, cancer!" he cried. "I say the dark disease be cured."

With that, he moved abruptly to begin the Prayer Line, in a long gallery at the end of the building. Pandemonium followed closely behind, as five cameramen and five grips carrying tangled coils of cords jostled for position, struggling to keep T.B. Joshua in the frame during the transition. Beneath dozens of ceiling fans and wall-mounted flat-screen TVs, believers with their placards stood against the walls waiting to receive their healing. Their placards listed a strange mix of ailments, ranging from diseases that could be found in the index of any medical textbook, to approximations like "foot cancer" and "hip cancer," to plainly religious conditions like "evil attacks."

T.B. Joshua began at one end of the hallway, raising his hand toward a frail woman from the Ivory Coast whose sign said she had difficulty walking. "You are already delivered!" he bellowed. "Confess your freedom now." The woman slumped in her chair and dropped the microphone she'd been given. Then, after a few seconds, she stood and shouted, "Thank you, Jesus!" as ushers led her away.

T.B. Joshua had already moved on to the next patient. He pinballed around the room over the next two hours, pivoting to offer the best camera angle and fixing people in the Prayer Line with fierce, stony stares until they collapsed in heaps on the ground. A group of foreign staffers for Emmanuel TV -- Brits, Americans, French, Spaniards, Cameroonians -- passed a microphone around and took turns providing buoyant play-by-play of the service in their native tongues, beamed live onto the televisions overhead and inside the church's main hall.

"Man of God, please help me," a young woman shouted from the sidelines. T.B. Joshua spun around and thrust a hand toward her chest. "In Jesus's name!" he yelled, and the woman fainted. 

An American commentator grabbed the mic and took up the thread: "Behold the awesome power of our Lord. That name, Jesus Christ, has been invested with all the power in the universe. When the man of God utters those words, healing takes place instantly." Through all of this, handlers cycled new patients continually into the Prayer Line and took old ones out more rapidly than some people, hobbling or clutching open wounds, could manage. "Keep moving, keep moving," they urged. A few of those who'd received healing stopped just outside to give televised testimonials; others were herded back inside.

Angela, a Californian who'd been assigned as my minder for the day, anxiously kept me near the center of the action, tugging at my sleeve to bring me closer to T.B. Joshua or shielding me with one arm to avoid the scrum of cameramen and cord wranglers who reorganized themselves constantly around him. Eventually, it became overwhelming, and I walked out into the street.

A young woman high off her encounter with T.B. Joshua sat on a bench devouring a plate of rice. Her father had brought her all the way from rural Ghana to participate in the Prayer Line. The pair was jubilant: The daughter appeared to have been cured of an addiction to eating soil and "cancer of the blood."

A few minutes later, I called Ejike to see how his brother was feeling. Ejike and Nwana had been planning to come to the Prayer Line, but in the end they'd stayed in the lodge. "I don't even have the strength to walk from here to there," Nwana said.

This story was made possible by a grant from the International Reporting Project.

America no single match for Russia

Vladimir Putin, the man with an iron heart!

By M. I. Bhat

United States government has never given any credence to whatever appears in the alternate media – be it about 9/11 and the wars since, color revolutions, spying, torture, Syrian sarin gas attack, failed economy, jobs, growing domestic poverty and public anger, and so on.

It always promotes its own narrative however contrary the facts may be or however impeccable the credentials of the contrary camp.

One of the rather persistent themes highlighted by the alternate media over the past many years has been the decline in the US imperial power. But the USG, from President down to lowly State Department official, continue to see the world as their playing field.

So does the Congress. In fact Congress has always been a step ahead – ever on lookout to force American laws and social norms worldwide.

In this background the candid admission by the Secretary of State John Kerry and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the US “superpower” days are over comes as a big surprise. As Bloomberg reported, Kerry admitted that despite “enormous power” the United States “can’t necessarily always dictate every outcome the way we want, particularly in this world where we have rising economic powers -- China, India, Mexico, Korea, Brazil, many other people who are players.”

This is precisely what President Vladimir Putin had warned Washington in his famous 2007 Munich Speech when he said, “I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world.”

Unfortunately it took 7 long years for the repository of global wisdom and leadership in Washington to realize this.

Nonetheless, this is a huge success for rest of the world given how arrogantly and unilaterally the US has been deciding world affairs post-Soviet Union, in the process turning Franklin Roosevelt’s dictum on its head by breaking peace not just at one place but everywhere in the world. 

But, is the admission of the “changed world” enough?  Definitely not -- neither for the rest of the world nor for the US itself -- if the aim is world at peace. 

What is important is the acceptance by Washington that it is their own policies and actions founded on unbridled arrogance that forced the world to change. After all, as Putin put it, “There is a limit to everything.”

Also, equally important is that Washington accepts that the US, too, has changed – it is broke economically, politically, socially and morally; it has lost credibility. It is not just others but even majority of its own people feel threatened by the USG.

Both changes resulted from the false notion that the US destroyed the Soviet Union and its communist economy. Yet it was this hyped notion and the absence of any countervailing potent force that let the US stalk the world community like Godzilla for about two decades, that is, until President Vladimir Putin was forced to say ‘enough.’

Anyone believing that American money and military supplies helped Afghans bleed Soviet Union economically or that the collapse of the Soviet Union confirmed the success of capitalist economy over controlled economy should consider whose money and arms helped Afghans and Iraqis bleed the US and turn it into one of the most indebted nations in history. Moreover, who would say the millions of unemployed, homeless and hungry Americans -- thrown up, mind you, when US was at its peak -- are the best poster boys of the success of the (Western version) capitalist economy!

History repeatedly notes long wars have spelled the final death knell of many empires. As in the past, it is the long wars against determined enemies that broke economies of both “superpowers” -- Soviet Union with relatively lesser economy went down with just one long war, the US with greater economy needed two.

President Obama says no “military excursion” in Ukraine, and his Secretary of State John Kerry talks of using “21st Century tools,” meaning economic sanctions, against Russia. Someone ask Obama: When did US go to war against a powerful enemy that he felt need to discount military confrontation with Russia? After the Hollywood-scripted fancy of US victory over Nazi Germany in WWII has subsided, historian tell us it was Soviet Union that really bore the major brunt of defeating Germany, with US and Britain providing vital supporting roles only. A big hole in the ego balloon!

And someone ask Kerry: When did the US wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya happen if not in 21st century, and didn’t some of the “rising economic powers” exist then?

Both are talking crap, a naive attempt to cover up US impotence. US may possibly threaten China of military action (as Chuck Hagel did recently in veiled terms) but against Russia…? Well, that is different ball game US doesn’t have balls to play.

All this doesn’t mean US would opt for Gandhian non-violence. War is in the American genes. If overt war is not an option, it must go for covert one. Indeed, beginning with Georgia, that is the option Washington choose against Russia, baptizing it as the color revolutions. But how long?

Ruthless reaction to Georgia in 2008 should have given enough signals to the US that time is up for these covert “democracy promotion” games against Putin’s Russia. But perhaps success in repeating Gorbachev (backpedaling on no NATO expansion) on Putin in the case of Libya, Washington thought they could go on cornering Russia – so the game went on, first in Syria and now in Ukraine. 

Unless the idea is to provoke Russia, it is clear Washington once again miscalculated. If Putin didn’t let go the distant Tartus Syrian naval base, how could he possibly let Black Sea naval base go from its belly? While Syria is inching forward in reclaiming lost ground against US-sponsored terrorists, Ukraine has already lost Crimea. This is after spending 5 billion dollars and all propaganda hype against Russia – no less bizarre than making 38m wide x 13m high Boeing 757 plane pass through Pentagon’s 5mx5m deception hole without a trace on 9/11. 

How much more Ukraine loses will depend primarily upon how far continental Europe (mainly Germany and France) is willing to tail Washington and let Ukraine be used as proxy against Russia, and secondarily whether the coup-installed Ukrainian government is willing to fight this US’ proxy war. While the prospects for the former don’t look so bright beyond sanctions rhetoric given that EU and Russia are so intertwined economically, the latter seems rather quite plausible at least as long as the 27 billion dollar international aid is received and stashed in right accounts and Ukrainians reduced to cannon fodder zombies.

As of present there are ominous signs on the Ukrainian skies, in fact all over Europe. Europe is being lulled into belief that Putin is trying the reclaim Soviet empire thereby creating a scare among the former Soviet republics. But no one is even mentioning his outright support and cooperation to the US-led war in Afghanistan, ignoring the great opportunity he had in taking revenge on America. Or, the cooperation he gave in imposing sanctions on Iraq and Iran. Or, how coolly Russia has been seeking diplomatic way out to the US aggressive missiles bases getting closer to Moscow.

The agreement reached in Geneva over de-escalating tensions is good news but the joint statement is open to the danger of convenient reinterpretation, as has, unsurprisingly, already begun. For US and EU it means opportunity to once again ditch Russia like they did earlier on Libya. And Obama has given enough hints of this in his reaction to the agreement when he said, “My hope is that we actually do see follow-through over the next several days, but I don’t think, given past performance, that we can count on that.”

What past performance is Obama talking about -- Not an inch of NATO expansion to the east, no militarization of Eastern Europe, encouraging Ukrainian opposition plot a coup against their elected President moments after they entered a deal with him and then recognizing the coup-installed government?

Obama added: “[W]e have to be prepared that we can actually respond to what continue to be efforts of interference by the Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine.” Well, to get the right message world in general and Putin in particular need to replace the word “Russians” in the statement with ‘Americans’ and prepare accordingly for the situation likely to unfold.

Putin has marked the red line for Washington before he is forced to order his army cross the Ukrainian border: Safety and security of the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine. Instead of advising dialogue with pro-Russian protestors, US backed and encouraged Ukrainian army offensive against them while at the same time increasing offensive military capabilities in Eastern European states. The idea perhaps is why miss a chance to do yet another Afghanistan on Russia without spilling American blood?

There is no doubt America is impotent to deal on its own with resurgent Russia.

It is trying to use EU to nail down Putin on Ukraine. And Ukraine has thrown a critical challenge to the EU leadership (minus UK – the US mole within the EU): Should it tamely surrender its foreign policy to the US and let Washington really ruin the EU by allowing one of their peoples and countries used as a sacrificial lamb and in due course bring turmoil within their borders like the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan did to much of the Muslim world.

EU’s final decision must not be swayed by Soviet-era negative experience of some of its members (like Poland) but guided by the experience of wider section of its member-states vis-à-vis Russia as an economic partner.