Ghana Day 22

It was a bad day for commuters. While I had a perfectly lovely time getting a taxi in the morning, we wet around on a dirt (and at that time, mud) road to avoid traffic. We got held up behind a shiny, new-looking black BMW that was stuck in the mud and trying to move sideways. On the way home, we passed a tro-tro (big van this time) that had apparently tried to get around traffic by driving on the burm but misjudged the depth of a puddle and sank right in. When we saw it, its back right corner was about 4 feet lower than its other corners.

Oil update: I posed Grandma’s opinion to Awudu the other day to see what his reaction might be. Technically, it seems she was correct. The NDC called for price reduction in oil, the NPP reduced the price. However, the prices were (according to Awudu) super high because of international prices, which makes sense, and then after the reduction the NDC said they would reduce it even more. According to my always-reliable source, the degree of difference between the Ghana oil price and the international price has been higher under the current NDC government than it was under the NPP.

An interesting sidebar from the Graphic yesterday (I’m having Grandma give me her day old papers to save on having to buy them myself) – there’s an article (not an editorial, mind you) in the paper talking about how indebted the Tema Oil Refinery was under NPP and how they said they were raising petrol prices to pay down the debt, but then didn’t. What is interesting, though, about the article is the way it ends: “Looking back at the events of last December, one cannot help but applaud Ghanaians for having rightly jettisoned the NPP Government, for, one could not rightly imagine what would have been the fate of this country if it had remained in such hands for four more years.” Ha! This article was most definitely written at the urging of the current admin (if not actually ghost-written by a politician) in response to the anger and accusations over the petrol hike.

Another interesting thing I glean from this particular paper is that the government seems to be doing some good things. Starting in September, one million Ghanaian children will have free school uniforms. I may have missed it, but I don’t think the Guide carried this story despite its obvious interest to everyone with family. Limited space I’m sure…

So today Parliament got pretty rowdy. First the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development had to answer three questions, and sucked a little at some followups. For example, road construction equipment has been delivered to 36 out of 42 Districts that ordered it, but he did not have reasons on hand exactly why the last six had not been delivered. I’m not sure why that sort of thing would not make it into the first answer, let alone why the Minister wouldn’t be prepped to answer it. Oh well.

He was what I covered though, so obviously not worth too much time. The interesting parts were Awudu’s stories.

First, the Minister of Finance had to get up and tell everyone how much the transitional team’s operating costs were. I don’t know exactly why such costs weren’t known before now, since they met between mid-January and mid-March, but whatcha gonna do. In any case, apparently more than 350,000 cedis were spent for the 2 months (around $250,000), and 135,000 cedis ($94,000) of that was spent on lunch, water, snacks, and tea. That’s for close to 200 people for two months. It’s actually sort of reasonable (maybe even a bargain) by US government standards I think, but I’m pretty sure the Government of Ghana doesn’t have the same sort of resources. So the MPs (NPP minority of course) kept shouting about it and how “one point three five billion cedis were spent on tea” – because obviously you need to say it in the old cedis so it sounds more impressive. I guess some ministries have an annual budget of less than 40,000 cedis, so they might have a point. What I thought was funny though is that they complained loudest over the Minister’s claim that the transition team was multiparty and that the members of all the parties involved in the team were given Honoraria, when they claimed they had not been paid. They were pretty indignant.

A second question got posed but got an inadequate amount of time, which was the provision of a complete list of the sale of state-owned companies (divestment) and how much money had been made and how much was still owed. No totals were given, and we started late, so I calculated up a bunch of number combinations. About $3.5 million is still outstanding to the government from various sources in 2000 and before, so the first NDC admin. Around $825,000 is still owed from sales in the first NPP administration (although there were fewer of them), and since then there’s a lot of money that’s owed but since the purchases were recent I would need to look at a bunch of contracts to know how much of that is actually delinquent. This was all provided to us in the form of a spreadsheet basically, with no totals of anything anywhere except the total number of sales. Really not user-friendly. I thought I was being a good reporter type by looking into it a bit more and aggregating things, but Awudu claimed the story and never asked me for figures, so who knows what sort of story comes out of it.

Tomorrow I’m going to parliament and then to the University for a conference on math : ( I hope I survive it!