Ghana Day 21

Hey! I wrote a story! It made it onto page 4, but not the website : / See the post below for the text, since I wouldn’t deprive you all of my literary genius.

So this evening I finally got around to getting a Daily Graphic (the state paper). It’s a little like a book. Very substantial. (The Guide only has 25 or so pages, this one is probably 100.) It certainly isn’t what I’d call hard-hitting, but at the same time it is much more informative and has more useful type stories that mostly avoid the sensationalism and wild accusations the Guide mostly has. So give and take I suppose. It will be interesting to work there, if I ever get confirmation on that.

So today I made my way all by my lonesome to Parliament. Awudu had trouble getting a car to the office because of the rain and oversleeping—shockingly this morning I had a total 5 minute wait time on getting a ride into the city, which is a personal best. I think perhaps I was up at my normal time and everyone else sort of lets the rain slow them down, so I beat the folks who would normally take up space in the cars.

In any case, we went in to parliament, and besides the statements about today being the Day of the African Child (as per my article), the only interesting point of business was that there was an Urgent Question that was scheduled to be addressed to the Minister of Youth and Sports on the African Hockey Championship to be held in July in Ghana (field, not ice – I asked). Unfortunately, the Minister is on leave because he was found to have been misappropriating government funds (in a story that involved stealing thousands of cedis worth of diapers… very bizarre). Apparently his deputy is also having trouble, and so is the next in line, and no minister was briefed to be able to come before parliament and answer the question. So there was lots of shouting about that with people being indignant about not having this very important question answered.

There was also supposed to be a tabling of several reports that I could have written a story about, but the relevant minister decided they were faulty and withdrew them again. Oh well.

The only other interesting part to my day was seeing the final, submitted draft of the paper I wrote with Barak on political coercion in Tanzania. Very exciting and it’s nice to know it’s where it belongs now – where I have no more work to do for it.

Tomorrow should hopefully be an interesting day in parliament, since there are 4 or 5 questions to be answered, so I’ll likely get to write up some of those. It will probably be a pretty long session though : /

Until tomorrow!