Visit To A Land That Works

Representatives of Multichoice, co-organisers of the African Journalist of the Year Award, were waiting to receive us, even before we stepped out of the airport. Two of them were women. It was my first appreciation of just how beautiful Ghanaian women are. But I had not seen anything yet. At least until we got to our hotel, the African Regent. African Regent is one of the most beautiful hotels in Ghana. It is certainly not 5-Star, but it is posh and eye-catching. It is located beside the personal residence of Ghana’s President, John Kufuor (Kufuor does not stay in the State House) and belongs to the President’s son. The hotel eloquently illustrates the security situation in Ghana. It has no gate, unlike what obtains with most hotels in Nigeria.

From the hotel’s observatory, one can see Shoprite, the Ghanaian outlet of the grocery chain that is also a success in Nigeria. When TheNEWS visited Shoprite, Ghana, it was literally bursting at the seams with tourists who had come to the country to enjoy themselves. It was discovered that most of the eateries located in that massive shopping facility close to customers at 2.a.m. It was not difficult to see the massive impact good security was having on nightlife and the Ghanaian economy. Taxis are operating way past midnight, taking people hither and thither. To move around in Nigeria so late at night can be very dangerous!

But nothing can beat the excitement of visiting Accra’s beautiful beaches, especially, Labadi. On this beach, on Saturday 19 July 2008, the aroma of Ghanaian kebab and meat sausage wafted in the air, as girls in mini skirts hawked a variety, including confectionery. The tourists from Europe and America are the targets of Ghanaian hookers here. A reed-thin Ghanaian girl, probably in her teens, literally threw herself at two holidaying whitemen. Thin as Australian artiste Nicole Kidman before her pregnancy, the size zero lass giggled seductively as she chatted with the whitemen. Labadi is not the only clean beach in Accra, but it is remarkable for the organisational savvy of its owners.

There are lifeguards who ensure that swimmers do not drown in moments of unrestrained joy. They monitor the waves and tell the revelers where not to go, especially where there are holes in the sand. Even when people play football at the shoreline, the lifeguards, about six of them, can call off the game when they think the Atlantic is getting very dangerous. The game can then resume when the sea is less turbulent.

The Labadi beach is the most preferred in Accra. During national holidays, at least 8,000 people throng the beach. There are several eateries on the beach, dotted by Coca-Cola parasols, around which a maximum of four chairs are arranged. There is the Labadi Beach Hotel located just behind the beach, where a lot of the tourists stay. It is arguably the best, most equipped hotel in Ghana.

Away from Ghana’s clean beaches, the streets are invitingly clean, especially the Ridge area. There are little signposts of the city’s street cleaning agency, Zoomlion reminding people of their obligation to keep Ghana clean. Perhaps the dirtiest part of Accra is Makola, but on the day TheNEWS visited, three compactors worked round the clock to clean the area, where so many Nigerian traders have their shops. It is true that traffic gridlock is becoming a problem in Ghana, but it is not as bad as often talked about. And certainly not approaching Lagos proportions. Remarkably, throughout our six-day stay in Accra, we never saw a single pot-hole on an Accra road, neither did we see waste on road medians as we are already accustomed to seeing in Lagos. And more importantly, there was no incident of power outage.

Accra doubles as Ghana’s commercial as well as political capital. The banks are mostly located in Osu. On Oxford Street, Osu, easily the busiest, there are banks like Amalgamated, Standard Chartered, Barclays National Investment Bank and Fidelity Bank. The biggest fast food outlets, jewelry shops, eateries and shopping malls are here, too. No visit to Accra can be complete without a visit to Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, where the mausoleum of the Ghanaian hero of independence and pan-Africanist is located. Inside the mausoleum are pictures representative of the life and times of Nkrumah, from when he stepped out of the James Fort Prison, Accra on 21 March 1951, the declaration of independence for Ghana on 6 March 1957 and the moving picture of Nkrumah’s mother wailing upon being informed of the death of her son. To show just how Ghanaians cherish the memory of Nkrumah, on 18 July, when they marked their Liberation Day, speeches made by Nkrumah were played to those in attendance, including the Nigerian High Commissioner, Musiliu Obanikoro.

Within the Memorial Park, commemorative trees were planted by African leaders to promote greenery during celebrations of Ghana’s Golden Jubilee and the 9th African Union Summit in Ghana on 1 July 2007. However, it was observed that while many of the trees planted were alive and well, the Mahogany tree planted by Zimbabwe President, Robert Mugabe was dead! Not far from the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park is the Centre for National Culture, which plays host to the Textiles Market. This place is always besieged by tourists from all over the world, for the Ghanaian fabric is a hit with many foreigners. With the Ghanaian currency stronger than the dollar, not all exciting items in Ghana could be picked up.

Intriguingly, there are signboards in the Greater Accra area urging citizens to pray for Ghana. When asked whether it reflected just how religious Ghanaians are, a journalist working for one of the country’s newspapers echoed the words of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, 19th century Russian writer that “when God does not exist, everything is then possible.” In a country keen to make good money from tourism, the Ghanaians we met throughout impressed us with their simplicity. President Kufuor, for example, does not go around with so much security. During the gala night for the African Journalist of the Year Award, a female Ugandan journalist noted that the Ghanaian President came with only five security cars, and no aggressive beating of a path for the President and asked: “Is this all the security Ghanaians can give their President? Museveni won’t even attend a gala night and if he did, you and I won’t be standing here so close to him.”

For the unbeatable services provided in the hotels Nigerian journalists stayed, there is already a determination on the part of many of them to return to Ghana. Unlike in Nigerian hotels where many receive you warmly more out of duty than pleasure, it was clear these hotel staff have been well trained. Not once did we see one of them get angry. While the girls in the African Regent Hotel were amply endowed, the ones in the restaurant were generally slim and cute. Only a painstaking selection process must have yielded the kind of beautiful girls employed in the African Regent. Like their male counterparts they were extremely polite. If the cuteness and politeness of Ghanaian girls can’t make one to return to Ghana, nothing else will.