TEN TAKEAWAYS FROM THE SHATTA MOVEMENT FAMILY'S SHOW IN ALAJO

It’s now 2:50 am in the morning. I am now entering home after the Lord answered my prayer to make my deeply-slept sister Ruwaida pick my call and help me with the locked gate. That prevented me from using the burglar approach of jumping the wall which I usually do. With my Quran chapter 12 on replay and my Zesta Plantation Fresh Strawberry tea in my jug, I decide to make my observations from the Shatta Movement Family show staged in Alajo dance to Rudeboy Ranking’s “Dan Banza” on my monitor.

1.     I hate a duicker called Shatta Wale. On the other hand, our elders say we should never fail to acknowledge its swiftness no matter how much we hate it. Never will I forget how his presence helped in unearthing musical talents in Nima-Maamobi and its environs. He has succeeded in awakening the giants in the youth albeit some of the noisemakers who claim they are also doing Dancehall.

2.     Rudeboy Ranking is a man from another planet. His performance at the show was the tour de force of the entire programme. He has succeeded in winning the hearts and souls of the Dancehall aficionados in town. I was left wondering whether I was not in town since I found myself numb when everyone was singing along when he was on stage. A consistent diligence will see him ripping off the musical charts and placing him on a high musical pedestal in few months to come.

3.     The 2011 VGMA Reggae-Dancehall artist of the year, IWAN,  has suffered a real dip in his hitherto fine run in form. On a different angular look, IWAN could just be facing the music of life which is full of vicissitudes. He is still cutting out positive and conscious-minded lyrical songs which show his class as a force to reckon with the Reggae-Dancehall industry.  After all is said and done, IWAN will bounce back. That I believe. If you are in doubt, be reminded that there was a Bandana now Shatta Wale as a reference point.

4.     Mr. Logic and his Shatta Movement Family are doing well. However, they could be more effective in their ambitions if they cast themselves off the insults and calumnies they heap on Shatta Wale each time they grab the microphone. I don’t see the youth kowtowing to their hackneyed story of bringing Shatta Wale to the lime-light and he usurping their Shatta Movement from them and bla bla bla bum bum bum.  And so what? They should just concentrate and move on. The youth have their ears clogged when it comes to bad-mouthing Shatta Wale. They won’t listen to anything save his good music and positive side.

5.     Vibrant Faya should do a thorough self-introspection to find out if music is really what he can do.  With all the money and resources being lavished on him by the Shatta Movement Family, all he could come out with is the “Mampi” tune that he has continuously tried to push down through our olfactory lobes? The guy should be serious if he wants to go far.

6.     And if there’s anyone one whom the organizers must get on the knees and thank fervently, then it is the New-Town boy Bastero. That guy’s performance was a terrible mystery on the night. He brought the show back to a heightened sense of vitality after a couple of clowns mounted the stage to give us gibberish noises. Bastero is full of energy and should work very hard.

7.     Our people from the Zongo should exercise restraint and learn how to settle issues patiently.  The fighting and belligerence will not take us anywhere. And the Juede guy should be mindful of the fact no matter what there will be misunderstanding in such enterprises and never should he bring out a gun no matter the atmosphere.

8.     For once I thought I was in a furnace considering the cloud of ganja smoke that was hovering around the whole place. The youth smoke beyond reason in modern day Ghana.  A serious step must be taken to stem these iniquitous acts. The nation cannot have its youth engage in wanton smoking bouts.

9.     Ras Kuku should move past the eccentricity he wants to be known with and come out of the cemetery he is noted to be living in. His is too talented to be lagging behind. Puom must also be seen and heard more massively.

10.                        Dancehall is still having its field day in Ghana music. If you don’t know  what Dancehall is, you surely know Reggae. Well, “Dancehall is a rough , immensely scratchy  ‘street’ style of Reggae.”

Inusah Mohammed.

NB: The writer is a National Service Person with the Graphic Communications Group Ltd.

BEYOND THE HORIZON OF FRIENDSHIP LIES BROTHERHOOD

Today, 8^th December, 2014 is a very special day to me.  It is an august day because it coincides with the anniversary of birth of a very great friend of mine. And he has this to say about friendship which I will let out when I talk about the power of friendship. I crave your indulgence to begin like this;

In the Holy Quran, friendship was chronicled in a chapter that is 110 verses long. The Chronicle basically highlights how seven friends, the eighth of which was a dog left town to distance themselves from the iniquities of their people. They therefore sought refuge in a cave in order not incur the wrath of their wicked king and his subjects whose indescribable debauchery and ignoble deeds have reached a fever pitch high. This bond led them to their miraculous martyrdom in the cave. A company formed for service to Allah. That is the power of friendship.

My short stint with Christianity in the early nineties has imbued in me a strong sense of this weak and fragile in skin yet strong and formidable in spirit thing called friendship. My Sunday schools at Bishop Charles Agyin Asare’s Word Miracle Church now known as Perez Chapel led me to the story of David and Jonathan. Their story captured in the Book of Samuel of the Hebrew Bible is a story in which some medieval and Renaissance theorists described as Romantic love and a true representation of homosociality; same-sex relationships that are far from sexual activities. A story filled with heightening sense of suspense.

Friendship over the centuries has proven to be a very vibrant and viable force, a defier of all odds, a harbinger of hope and a purveyor of a gale of love that is more powerful that all hurricanes that have caused massive destructions to the world lumped together.

To see how powerful this thing called friendship is, let’s consider some statements made about it.

 Imam Ali (as) stated: "Two true friends are a single soul in different bodies." The same Imam Ali also stated “Friendship transfers a stranger in to a relative."

In his book “Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian life”, Henri J.M. Nouwen said this “When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
Of all the statements made about this great abstract noun, I love the one made by a friend the most. Before I unleash this poignant statement made by him, I’ll love to first make him known to the world.
This friend was born in the early nineties. We met last two decades and the bond kept increasing as the days unfolded. He is named Hamza Ayub. Presently there is a third name added to it to make it Hamza Hajj Ayub. In the school in which we met, I was then in class two when he was in class one. We had a special interest in him due to the fact he rode a bicycle and as young as we were, fascination was an understatement of how we felt when he rode past us. Another reason was that he is the son of one of the foremost scholars we have in Nima. As fate will have it, we found ourselves in the same class because I had to repeat the class due to the severity of my truancy by then. And that’s where the spirit of comradeship started till today as I make the letters on my keyboard dance on the monitor.

Now to the beef of all this needless description, this friend has the cardinal aspect of what friendship entails; brotherhood. He is kind. He is generous to the point of negligence. He never loses touch of a friend in need or a friend in despondence.

All friends will attest to the fact that he has what it takes to also offer his thoughts on the subject matter of discussion. And he has offered it aptly and rightly.
After considering the bond that led the seven friends to the cave and the same bond that kept David and Jonathan together and other references in the dim recesses of history, he came to a very powerful conclusion. And this is it:

“Beyond the horizon of friendship lies brotherhood.”

Happy earthday Hamza Hajj Ayub. I wish you more birthdays because “Statistics show that those who have more birthdays live longer.”

NB: The writer is a National Service Person at the Graphic Communications Group Limited.

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. GABBAS AND MR. BUGGERY

Those who shrug off fictional literature may not have appreciated the fact that it is the produce of the human brain. They may not have realized that the most efficacious organ in our Adams body is the small, miraculous meat-like structure in our skulls. One of the most striking descriptions ever given to the brain was by Benjamin Carson, the famous Pediatric neurosurgeon who led the team of doctors who separated twins joined in the head successfully in 1986.

In an interview, he was asked why he wanted to be a neurosurgeon and he answered “the brain is a miracle……… Imagine Hendel! How could he compose something like The Messiah in three weeks”? Solid!

How could Chinua Achebe write from head ‘Things fall apart’ in response to a book cleverly written to conceal the inherent racism against Blacks in it, ‘In the Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad?   More surprisingly, how could Jules Verne produce from the same brain in the year 1865 the book ‘From the earth to the moon’ which was truly actualized in the year 1969 (a century and more later) by Neil Armstrong and his colleague Buzz Aldrin when they spent two hours, thirty one minutes exploring on lunar surface? That is the power of Jules Verne’s brain.

 Now to the crux of this piece, how on earth did the Scottish writer, Robert Louis Stevenson envisage that a medical doctor at Effia Nkwanta Hospital will be a reference point in diligence and philanthropy and simultaneously be a merciless sodomite and anal-consuming Homo sapien?

In 1886, the book ‘The strange case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ was published. In the said book, a man who commanded much respect as a medical doctor in his town doubled as the most loathed harbinger of wickedness in that same town. The books highlight was its association with the mental imbalance that was rare, known as Split personality which psychiatrists term “dissociative identity disorder” which shows how a person can exhibit vastly different moral character from one situation to another. Dr.Sulley Ali-Gabbas seriously epitomizes this mental disorder.

 The Jekyll side of Dr. Sulley Ali Gabbas

When Saeed Jallo, the representative of the Muslim Community on the Western Regional Peace Council spoke to Accra-based Joy FM about Dr. Sulley Ali Gabbas, I nearly cried a gallon full of tears. He stated: “When you go to the Muslim communities, you will see that every place is quiet because Dr Sulley Gabbas is one person who has helped the religion of Islam. The youth and student body of Ghana Muslim Students Association have been supported by Dr Sulley Ali-Gabbas both physically and financially.”  The Staff at the Effia Nkwanta Hospital have also attested to the hardworking character of the man. He was a man who was far from being indolent. He was always diligent in his work.
Interestingly, when the Executive Secretary of Narcotics Control Board, Mr. Akrasi Sarpong earlier this year hinted that marijuana should be legalized, Dr.Sulley Ali-Gabbas spoke vehemently against it. He raised the fears that the youth will use the NACOB boss statement as a safe haven to smoke with untold impunity. He therefore appealed to the government not to legalize it since it is malignant to the human health. This was Dr.Sulley Ali Gabbas good side. Genteel, demure, calm, cool and collected man of repute and much reverence. No wonder mentorship was the bait he used in trapping the young victim when they struck an acquaintance on Facebook.

 The Hyde side of Sulley Ali-Gabbas 

On the flip-side, a sixteen year old boy finds himself despondent and forever adrift in pain in his anal cavity due to five painful, unlawful and inhuman bouts of sex with a sodomite called Dr.Sulley Ali-Gabbas as alleged. The boy is also suffering from the dreadful HIV/AIDS; a disease the doctor denied infecting him with. For the boy to look up to the Doctor for a mentor-mentee relationship only to end up being mentored in his anus shows how wicked, vicious and unforgiving Dr. Sulley could be. It was shocking to the marrow when he stated that it was the boy who pestered him. It was reported that he even refused to give the boy money to fend for himself when he started having complications in his anus. This action of Dr.Sulley Ali Gabbas is repugnant and condemnable by all standards. It is sour to taste and unpleasant to the ear.

 The nation must come out clear                                 

I read with disgust, the article written by Dr.Sodzi Sodzi-Tettey in the Daily Graphic of Saturday,25th October, 2014 titled “Sodomizing them young” about a young boy called Lexis who was also sodomized to despondency by his class teacher. With these actions occurring frequently, I believe the nation must come out clear on Homosexuality. The nation cannot continue to be ambivalent over its stance on this dreadful, barbaric sexual orientation. If the nation does not come out clear on this, we will continue to have more of such cases. Over the years, a lot of quack scientists have tempted to scientifically justify homosexuality but all fall flat like a pack of cards. No scientific theory can explain homosexuality. It is simply inexplicable! 

When Blakk Rasta of Hitz fm fame hinted that Sigmund Freud, the father of Psychoanalysis, had described homosexuality as a mental disorder, the ignoble proponents of this bad act came out to say it could be as a result of the genetic make-up. Blakk Rasta therefore couched it in a way I like the most:

“Homosexuality is therefore, a mental and genetic disorder.”

NB: The writer is a National Service Person at the Graphic Communications Group Ltd.

WHY GHANAIAN STUDENTS MUST READ EXTENSIVELY

The purpose of this piece is to tell the intellectually-stimulating, powerfully-inspiring and significantly-revealing rendezvous I had with Mr John N. Tagoe, the Strategy Manager of the Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL).

As a norm, new entrants in any organisation are oriented on the structure of the organisation. And on this particular day, we were taken round the company by Mr. Leonard of the HR department of GCGL as a form of Orientation till we got to the office of Mr. Albert Sam, the Corporate Communications Manager.

He gave us pieces of advice and took us through his experiences in life as a Media Practitioner. We then had to move to the office of Mr. John N. Tagoe, a man we were already told will check the efficacy of our skulls by asking us questions.

“What is a must-read story?” He quizzed the journalists among us.

“You read design. Tell me something about the front page of the day’s Daily Graphic.

“What are the four C’s of Marketing?” He asked me?

“What is the thrust of the Mirror Newspaper”?

The man then took us beyond our fields of study and started asking questions he felt everyone who passes through the University should know.

Our interaction with the man was intellectually stimulating because it made us realise how learning can be intensely enjoying and profoundly empowering.

Especially when he gave us a very powerful quotation from the one-time premier of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, to emphasise the need for us to nourish our brains and kindle our minds for the betterment of our lives.

Winston made this poignant statement in a speech at Harvard University on September 6th, 1943. He said “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

The powerfully inspiring aspect of our interaction was the fact that we learned instantly how a spirited effort, determined spirit and persistent dedication to study can mould a person into a citadel of knowledge which is much needed in this ignorance-frowning world.

Finally, it was significantly revealing because it manifested the state of the Ghanaian student today. It is painful but must be stated. It is the truth and must be spoken even if the mouth shakes.

The truth is that the Ghanaian student now does not read! The Ghanaian student does not cherish books, the nutrients of a fertile brain. The Ghanaian student does not read beyond his notes. Creativity is stifled and innovation almost absent in the Ghanaian student due to the narrow dimensions of the mind of the Ghanaian student.

In his first place winning article in the International Essay Competition organised by the Center for International Private Enterprise (Enterpreneurship and Leadership Category) in 2009, Mahmoud Jajah registered this critical observation;

“Today in Ghana, most young graduates expect the government to employ them and in the absence of government employment, they cannot do anything for themselves ………….. The old concept of “go to school, get good grades, and you will get a good job” is still the order of the day. Students read only their course materials – nothing more – as they have no incentive to excel.” He further stated                       

“Most young entrepreneurs in Ghana lack the necessary knowledge and expertise to manage their businesses, especially knowing how to finance their endeavors.

Whilst there is information available to young people through books or business magazines, they do not seize these learning opportunities since many are trapped in the old linear mindset of education: good grades means a stable government job. Young people seem to start their business almost by accident without any clue as to how to manage it successfully.” Powerful!

That is the appalling situation today in Ghana. Sterile arguments, unproductive ventures, adventurous and unabated beach parties, amorous social trips inter alia, are the current fad on our campuses. The most disgusting aspect is how male students expose their bare buttocks with their genitals sometimes showing as a form of ‘jama singing’. 

No wonder we churn out a lot of graduates yet cannot manage our simple problems.

We still do not know how to manage waste in this seemingly accursed country of ours. In-depth study of courses is virtually-non-existent and literacy programmes on our campuses is a thing of the past.

The Students’ Week celebrations in our schools is always laden with beach parties almost all of the days of the week, no quiz-contests not to even talk about debate competition to whip up the spirit of research in students.

And we have a whole back-log of graduates who because of the constricted nature of their minds due to lack of extensive reading, cannot do anything for themselves and  do not even have the confidence a graduate is supposed to exhibit. The earlier we start to rewire our minds, the better.

When we always say Nkrumah was ahead of his time, he did not achieve that feat out of the blue or by simply going to school to pass exams. No! Far from that! Nkrumah married books, he cherished them, and he read voraciously and ravenously fed on any literature he came across.

This was how he captured what imbued in him the sense of organization which gave him the fillip to liberate Ghana and Africa from the clutches of colonialism.

 “My aim was to learn the technique of organisation. I knew that when I eventually returned to the Gold Coast I was going to be faced with this problem. I knew that whatever the programme for the solution of the colonial question might be, success would depend upon the organization adopted.

I concentrated on finding a formula by which the whole colonial question and the problem of imperialism could be solved. I read Hegel, Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mazzini.

The writings of these men did much to influence me in my revolutionary ideas and activities, and Karl Marx and Lenin particularly impressed me as I felt sure that their philosophy was capable of solving these problems. But I think that of all the literature that I studied, the book that did more than any other to fire my enthusiasm was Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey published in 1923. Garvey, with his philosophy of 'Africa for the Africans' and his 'Back to Africa' movement, did much to inspire the Negroes of America in the 1920's.”

That was Nkrumah, then an undergraduate. How many of us students can boast of reading anything of such nature? We must begin to revise our notes and pick up extensive reading habit. That is the salvation for this country.

On the morning of 20th July, 1948, Nkrumah spoke without notes for about ten minutes to a first batch of ten students when he founded the first Ghana National College. He told the students:

“'The African today is conscious of his capabilities. Educational and cultural backwardness is the result of historical conditions.”  He then urged all present and future students, both boys and girls to consider laziness as a crime.

“Think! Study hard! Work with sustained effort. As never before we want thinkers— thinkers of great thoughts. We want doers—doers of great deeds. Of what use is your education if you cannot help your country in her hour of need?

The writer is a National Service Person at the Graphic Communications Group Ltd.