It was my last session of parliament today : ( Sadness. Before I got to work I stopped at the closest thing to an Office Max and picked up a couple nice pens, which I gave as presents to Al Hadji, my editor ho helped me get into the Graphic, and Awudu, who has humored my tagging along with him for 3 weeks now. They both went over very well, with Al Hadji telling me how much he loves pens and Awudu being way overly pleased.
Parliament itself was sort of interesting. The minister answering questions was the guy in charge of road construction, so he fielded 5 questions from MPs asking when roads/ bridges in their constituencies would get built/fixed/whatever. In most of the cases, the completion date on the project has passed and construction is around 10% completed, so it was pretty dismal. Hopefully that wasn’t a representative sample of construction projects, with the squeaky wheel getting to ask questions and whatnot, but it might just be.
There were at east 3 times over the course of the morning (as there was yesterday) when fewer than half of the MPs were in the floor so there wasn’t a quorum and they had to wait around while people went looking for the other guys. It was really annoying. Apparently committee meetings have been scheduling sessions during parliament, which is rather problematic seeing that committee members are MPs. The leadership has been complaining about that since the beginning of the session, but I haven’t seen much improvement.
The final thing relates to oil production. There is a new contract about to be signed for oil exploration rights and whatnot, and the agreement is good (better than one from before, because it give the government 20% of the revenue rather than 15% as it was before. So everyone is happy with the agreement, but the president has appointed as head of the Ghana National Petroleum Commission (or whatever GNPC stands for) someone who worked as an employee of the previous contract holder. In fact, he only resigned from that post the day after officially taking over this new position. So the NPP is really upset and wants the president to get rid of him, and the NDC mostly agrees but can’t say anything. They haven’t been obnoxiously yelling NPP MPs off the floor and telling them to sit down though. Finally they decided to put off the resolution to pass the contract until next session so that they could deliberate. I’m interested to see if anyone tries threatening to withhold the contract approval in exchange for the guy’s resignation.
Back at the office I wrote the story on the roads. Apparently the reporters were teasing Awudu and saying they wanted to tag along to parliament too, since my stories have been getting printed pretty frequently in the past week or so. I feel like that’s not actually my fault though, because Awudu re-encapsulates the stories and gives them better headlines, so they’re more attractive and readable and “house style.”
My editor gave me a nice little testimonial that he signed with the pen I got him, which was nice. He also offhandedly told me about something I thought was sort of major. There’s a minister who just resigned who is from the same ethnic group as he is, and he said the elders put pressure on him not to say anything bad about the guy. There was a story yesterday that he said he managed to keep out of the paper, but today’s story had to go in and so he said he was just “writing the facts” rather than spinning it, so hopefully the elders would not be too upset with him. He explained it as if it were perfectly normal as well. I suppose it might be.
I was also told on good authority today that although the political writers here are pretty extreme and sensationalist, they believe what they’re writing and the paper has only printed an erroneous story (with someone at the paper knowing it, of course) once – and the journalist who made it up was suspended, made to work in the printing room for a while, and then brought back on as a completely non-political writer (apparently he was too good to just fire). The explanation for why he did it was that he was under a lot of pressure to make headline news. But he made up an interview he had had with a minister, so I’m not sure how he didn’t think that would come back and bite him in the ass. I know I’ve said the PR people here suck, but they’re not that bad.
After that I pulled out the back volumes of the paper, and tomorrow (Saturday) I’ll be going into the office, despite nominally have had my last day, to look through them and pull out good stories bits for comparison with the Graphic.
The ride home was interesting. Normally my tro-tros do things I’m not terribly fond of and go through mud I don’t think they should, but this time I think we were in actual danger of tipping over, getting stuck in pond-sized puddles, and getting stuck on large and narrow mounds of dirt multiple times. It was pretty ridiculous. We completely left civilization for a while, and honestly it took us about the same amount of time as it would have if we had just waited in traffic (and I would have been able to buy snacks on the side of the road if we had done that). Oh well.
Alright, passing out now!
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