Katey came to work with me today, which gave me an excellent opportunity to hear names again that I had forgotten and strike up conversations with people I don’t normally talk to, in the name of getting her acquainted with them. Some interesting things came out of it.
So Cephas, who is the photojournalist I leant my camera to right before I went to Cape Coast, turns out to be a fascinating character. He’s not actually Ghanaian, but Liberian, and he came to the country as a refugee during the 1980s when horrible things were happening between Sierra Leone and Liberia. Apparently there is actually a refugee camp outside of Accra, which boggled my mind because I haven’t heard a thing about them. It really makes you wonder, because the number of displaced people and refugees in the world is really huge, and they have to go somewhere. So Chas has an NGO and a newspaper that are active in helping the Liberian population in Ghana. The paper is called The Vision (thevisiononline.net) and it’s a bimonthly paper that has news of interest to the folks there, and the NGO is there to help cater to some of the camp’s needs, to help people resettle in the now-peaceful Liberia, and to work on relations between the refugees and locals. Apparently there’s some significant xenophobia towards these folks. It’s really very interesting that people from Ghana’s neighboring countries face such hostility, but foreigners from elsewhere do not and folks from different ethnic groups within the country seem to get along alright. In any case, Cephas is going home to Liberia for a month starting in early July, but he offered to take me to the camp possibly this weekend. That will certainly be an experience.
In terms of why they are still here (since the war is obviously over), Cephas says it’s not so much a matter of lack of resources to get home, because the UN offers people a free trip home and $100 to start their lives again. The problem is more that there aren’t many jobs back home and $100 is not sufficient to start an enterprise or anything like that, especially with a family in tow, so people are mostly trying to save up as much as they can so that they can do something good when they go home. That sounds pretty reasonable.
Bennett was an even more interesting fount of knowledge today. There was a piece in the paper about how some recent military promotions were strongly ethnic (9 total, 6 were Volta [NDC-supporting region], and the other 3 were split between two other NDC supporting areas). The paper had a quotation from someone complaining that these people weren’t qualified for the promotion, so I asked Bennett (the author) if these people were really trustworthy or if they were more jealous because they had been passed over. Apparently the answer to my question is Bennett thinks both, and that these were people who had “been in line” so to speak and were skipped. Whether or not this was actually a meritocratic decision is still undecided, but it does reek strongly of regionalism.
So we were also given a bit of history about this current chapter in the military. Apparently in 2001 or so there was a gentleman (possibly a general, but high-up) noticed that there was strong regional bias in the armed forces after so long under the NDC, so he started trying to recruit with a more equitable formula. Bennett had a breakdown of the military by ethnicity (not one that the press was supposed to have, but that the military did not challenge when it was printed). It showed the Volta Region (the Ewes, very pro-NDC, and apparently one of the smallest regions population-wise) with 25% of the officer corps and 27% of recruits. The Eastern Region also had fairly high numbers, while the Ashanti region, which is supposedly NPP, had 3% or so of officers. There are ten regions. He carried on with that for many years under the NPP, but this January, right after NDC took power, he was charged and tried in a military court for charges that I didn’t catch. It seems nothing in particular was found against him, but he was discharged from the military. Bennett had a copy of the dismissal letter, which listed as the complaints only that “his services were no longer required” and that he had hurt the forces’ reputation by media coverage of him (not his saying anything, mind you, just being covered). I also saw his military academy scores, which were all impressive, so he was obviously a bright guy who happened to piss off the wrong people. I was assured that it had not been he who had been leaking things to the press but some other contact the Guide had in the military.
That led into a discussion of the election, because that is what Katey is studying here. She’s looking at the swing vote; the first round of the election was not decisive, but NPP got closer to 50% than NDC. But in the 2nd round, around 18% of voters – the amount who had voted for 3rd parties – all seemingly decided to vote NDC rather than NPP. It’s Katey’s job to ask around and find out why. So Bennett’s take on it, although he still says he’s not sure, is that it might have had something to do with popular displeasure at a couple things the NPP did in office between te two rounds. One thing was the oil, which I’ve talked about before. NDC called for the oil decrease, and NPP did it right before the 2nd round, after leaving high the rest of the 8 years they were in power. Also, there had been a big problem with traffic violations and after October or so lots of drivers had been jailed for them. The drivers had been campaigning strongly for NDC. After the first round, someone in the government said there had been some sort of error and had them all released. Although both of these things were obviously meant to influence the vote, it seems they had the opposite of desired effect.
Possibly a less credible explanation is one of irregularities. Bennett said that the woman ahead of him in line had been illiterate and asked the polling agent where she should mark, and he told her to mark on the NDC spot. Bennett said he reported the incident, and the person in charge thanked him and said it would be dealt with right away, but Bennett says he had heard of lots of other instances. I don’t think the electoral observers saw anything like that though. Apparently the NDC had also made sure that its supporters applied for the position of people who return the ballots to the Electoral Commission, although how they exploited that was left to innuendo.
In terms of campaigning, Bennett also affirmed that there had been some significant ethnic aspects. The Ashantis apparently own most of the commercial property in Accra and do very well for themselves, so the NDC played up how that group was responsible for all the problems people around here were seeing. They also connected the Ashantis to the NPP. While the NPP is not necessarily an Ashanti party, it is strongly Akan, which is the umbrella ethnicity for 7 or 8 or so groups that include Ashanti. So the NPP certainly suffered from that connection.
Bennett allowed that the NPP certainly had its share of faults in the campaign as well (like using the incumbent advantage), but the NDC was worse. Obviously. (Bennett strongly follows the paper’s editorial line.)
So that was what I learned today.
In terms of my future here, I heard from Prince that the application to the Graphic that I put in would take a month to get processed, so I should pick a different paper to switch to. That defeats the purpose, because my desire was to see public versus private paper, and I told him so. He’s “using his contacts” to see if he can speed it up to get me in for a week or two. However I mentioned this later to Al Hadji Gomda, the news editor, and he expressed disgust at the bureaucracy and called his friend over at the Graphic, and I’m going to go over there in the afternoon and meet with him. Hopefully something good comes out of that, because I’m not very impressed with Prince’s connections so far.
Also, there is salsa dancing at a club in town every Wednesday that Katey and I will be checking out, and a woman at work told me about a vegetarian restaurant that I definitely need to go to. So those are both exciting things. Apparently there are a good number of vegetarians, and the woman thinks it’s a health-based decision for most of them. Yet more evidence of how well off this country is. You either don’t eat meat because you can’t afford it, or you don’t eat meat because you can afford substitutes.
Looking forward to being back in parliament tomorrow!
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