I-CAN-GHANA

May I reminisce?

11th July 1994 was a Monday. I was still 26, bright-eyed, and a tad confused about life and its twists and turns. At 10:00am, it was definitely a nervous me who was ushered into the room where I was to defend my masters thesis with a long title: THE DESIGN AND OPERATION OF TAX INCENTIVES FOR FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT IN LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES.

You see, for the preceding 11 months I had been a student at the Faculty of Law, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada studying and writing, in an attempt to acquire a Master of Laws degree in International Taxation Law. The course itself was not stressful. Earlier in February, I had indicated to my supervisor, the late Professor Alec Easson (an extremely pleasant Englishman, Oxford and LSE grad), that I thought that I was ready to defend the thesis. He patiently explained to me that my course had a three-semester residency requirement, and that although he agreed that I was ready, I simply had to wait. I absolutely admired and adored Alec. He was the first law teacher to tell me “Ace, my name is Alec, not Prof Easson.” Another time, he said to me, when I was busily regurgitating law, “Ace, I am not really interested in how much law you know. I am more interested in what you think about the law you know.” Alec shaped my life and thinking in more ways than he ever knew, and I quietly mourned him when he died in January 2007.

Thus between March and July, I just had fun. I worked for Alec as his Research Assistant to make some extra money. And then I watched loads of TV. I also spent time discovering the more interesting aspects of Canadian life with my key buddies, Tanzanian lawyer Hamudi Majamba (now Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam) and Barbadian engineer Robert Bascom. And there was fun-loving Camerounian lawyer Nicoline Ambe (who still looks like she is 16), and Ghanaian MBA Aba Cato Andah, who was my movie-watching mate (yeah, Tuesdays were cheap nights). Ah, there was that Christmas 9-hour drive from Kingston to Philadelphia with American human rights lawyer Alan Clark (He has never stopped reminding me we got lost at some point because I couldn’t read, and then I left my passport in his car!!) But easily my ‘classleader’ was Andrea Timoll, whose thesis was on deconstructing Antigone and had coined the word “phallologocentrism.” And the encouragement of Prof Rosemary Ofei-Aboagye King. I wrote, arranged old Joyful Way songs, and did sequencing and pre-production of the songs that ended up on Joyful Way’s 1994 Osabarima album. And I did a lot of “church”, helping to organise a gospel music concert at my church. Incidentally, I am struggling to contact the church now. It seems to have disappeared. Yes, it was months of fun. But I digress.

When I entered the room, the law professors were there, some seated, and others grabbing a cup of coffee. Of course, Prof Easson was there. I also remember that Prof Venkata Raman (whose Foreign Investment/NAFTA course I had audited in the First Semester) was seated. I think the Dean of the Faculty, Prof Don Carter, was also there. And then there was the external examiner, Prof Vern Krishna, International Taxation expert from the University of Ottawa. and the then Executive Director of the National Committee on Accreditation of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada

I was directed to sit in a chair at the head of the table, my heart beating, but at the same time confident. For the next two hours, I thoroughly enjoyed the banter, question and answer, a unique opportunity to joust with my betters, my superiors and established academics in my area of study. At the end of it I was asked to leave the room for the panel to confer. When I was called back, Prof Krishna announced that I had passed, and that all I had to do was to fix some typos and formatting.

As was the tradition, the panel took me to lunch in some flashy restaurant in downtown Kingston. I was seated next to Prof Krishna. In the course of lunch he asked what my next plans were, and I said that although I had gained admission to do further grad work in Michigan, I was going back home to Ghana. He could not believe it. He calmly advised that I stay and apply to University of Ottawa to do the doctorate programme in international taxation law. He added that he would also recommend me for accreditation so that I could write the Bar exam and qualify to practice in Canada. He turned to Prof Easson and said to him, “this gentleman should not be going back to Ghana.”

Excited? Yes! Flattered? Yes! Tempting? Yes! I could simply melt into Canada, say bye-bye to Ghana. New life. New prospects.

But what did I do? That evening, I went through my thesis to fix the typos and formatting issues. I spent the next day, 12th July 1994 doing nothing but thinking. I made some hard decisions. I called my family in Philly to tell them what I was going to do. That night, I partied (like I had never done) with my flatmates who had organised a party for me. The next morning, I caught a Greyhound bus to Lester Pearson Airport in Toronto. It was from the airport that I called my cousins in Toronto to tell them that I was returning to Ghana. I boarded the Air India flight to London. I got to London the next day, 13th July 1994, spent the night with my sister at Maida Vale and was on the Ghana Airways flight back home to Ghana, touching down at Kotoka in the evening of 14th July 1994.

Why? Because the night of 12th July 1994 was a turning point in my life. I had the degree that I went to Canada to get. I thought long and hard. Did I really want a doctorate in law, so that I would become “Dr. Ankomah” by when I am 30? But was that what I wanted to do with my life? To the disappointment of my profs and some family members, I concluded that I did not want to spend the next 4 years of my life studying one area of the law just to add some more alphabets before and after my name. That was all a doctorate meant to me. Canada was a great country, but it was clearly not for me. North America was not for me. It was there that I discovered that I was black. I wasn’t ever going to get used to being checked out when I enter a shop, because being black meant that I was a potential shoplifter. I wanted to live and work in a country where most of the people I meet, would look like me!

I was only 26 years old. But I wanted to make some money, I mean real MONEY. I had spent a year as a scholarship student in Canada, and I didn’t want to spend more years like that. 20 years on, I am pretty certain that I would take the same decision if I was faced with it today.

So I arrived in Accra within 2 days of defending my thesis, got married, resumed work at my law firm, babies came along (yes, 3 of them in 5 years), Associate, Lecturer, Senior Associate, Senior Lecturer, Partner, Managing Partner…

[And now for the tired cliche] “The rest,” as they say, “is history.”

[Edited version published in the July 7 2014 edition of the Daily Graphic newspaper at page 42]

The Editor

Daily Graphic newspaper

Accra

Dear Sir:

I read with some amusement, the Opinion of my friend and senior Mfantsipim old boy, Colin Essamuah in his Abura Epistle column, and titled ‘A Stroll in the Park on Republic Day!’ I could not help but notice that although the Opinion was published in the July 4 2014 edition of the Daily Graphic, the page on which the Opinion is published bore the date “June 4”! The printer’s devil has a cruel sense of humour!

I participated in, and was very vocal at, what Mr. Essamuah derisorily called “A Stroll in the Park,” a particularly remarkable description of an event that involved braving a heavy rainfall, facing police blockades and risking arrests.

Middle Class?
Who cares? Tags don’t matter, and Mr. Essamuah knows that more than I do. I recall (faintly) that many years ago when his membership of the New Patriotic Party was challenged on the fatuous ground that he didn’t have a party card, he famously and rightly retorted that the NPP was not the Communist Party for which a party card was a be-all-and-end-all, or words to that effect. I am a Ghanaian. That is all that matters. Until July 1 2014, I had never participated in any demonstration. But that morning, I looked at my circumstances and that of the country, and concluded that the 4-year wait to “speak” only through a vote, is cowardice. The constitutionally guaranteed democratic space permits us to continuously give flesh and voice to what we think and feel about how this country is ruled.

Just like Mr. Essamuah, I had public secondary and university education in Ghana. That meant that both he and I, enjoyed government subsidies funded by the sacrifices of the Ghanaians, many of whom, and whose children, did not have the same opportunities. We owe to them what we have become, at least in part. I don’t know which class I belong to; I don’t care. The privilege of education imposes a duty upon me to fully occupy my democratic space when I see or feel that things are going off beam.

Have Things Gone Off Beam?
Of course they have. Mr. Essamuah doesn’t deny that. He only wants us to remain incurable optimists. But Electricity. Water. Fuel. Roads. Education. Basic needs. The lack of them. Under my ‘social contract’ with the government, I work (or starve), pay taxes and obey the law (or go to jail). The government has to provide all of the above, and more. But name it, and the government is unable to provide it; yet it gets antsy and the kittens when we demand that it should fulfil its side of the bargain?

Yes, for me, one other immediate cause was BRAZIL! Mr. Essamuah is right and wrong. It was not the elimination of the Black Stars (I didn’t think that they would get far anyway), but the embarrassment caused by that “money-on-plane” saga. This is against the background of our government and central bank restricting access to our legitimately acquired foreign currency in the banks. Fair, that’s the law. We live with it. Then our government (with our central bank’s approval or connivance), turns around, puts millions of foreign currency on our presidential jet and flies it into Brazil to live TV coverage and soap-opera rivaling ‘bling,’ exposing us to worldwide derision. A twitter handle purporting to be that of Steven Gerrard, England and Liverpool captain, cryptically said: “Pride and passion with commitment can’t be bought with a private jet carrying $3m.” And as if to prove him right, within days, we, who showed such sickening opulence in Brazil, announced that we are going to borrow foreign money to provide basic needs, such as sanitary pads to school girls. Mr. Essamuah might not see anything wrong with this picture. That is his democratic right. I see everything wrong with it; my democratic right.

And so I am tickled when Mr. Essamuah calls our views “preaching hopelessness.” Optimism is good. Baseless optimism is unwise. If the situation is pretty much hopeless, we must say it. It is the government’s duty to fix it!

Private Schools?
Mr. Essamuah has a problem with people whose children are in private schools, claiming that “most of the protesters” pay “fees in dollars and are ready to ship them out to foreign schools to become taxpaying citizens of other countries, as they look down upon our public schools.” That is intriguing. Mr. Essamuah, from which statistical bases did you arrive at or settle on your word “most”? What was your sample space and margin of error? And, by the way, it is illegal to pay fees in dollars in Ghana. If you know anyone who is still doing that, call the Bank of Ghana! But what takes the biscuit is your claim that the ability to send one’s children to foreign schools means one cannot love Ghana. Mr. Essamuah, can we ask the President which schools HIS children attend in Ghana and elsewhere? And, you and I, at some point, lived and studied in other countries. What does your conclusion say about you?

NPP?
Mr. Essamuah massages the refusal of the demonstrators to allow his good friend and one-time political ally, Asamoah Boateng to address them, and concludes that an unnamed “main rival” in the NPP was linked to this. That is funny. Obviously, Mr. Essamuah was not there. The chant was “no politician!” Need I say more?

Conclusion
The 1/7/14 #OccupyFlagStaffHouse demonstration was spontaneous. Unlike political parties, no one was bused there or paid money or given T-Shirts to appear. People got up from their homes, found their own way there, made their point, and went back home. Some government actors have desperately and laboriously sought to diminish what happened in many ways. But they have failed. The more they speak and write, the more they give traction to #OccupyFlagStaffHouse, and the more it becomes obvious that those “few” people drove a strong point home. The political establishment (howsoever constituted) has been forced to take notice. Even if the petition found its way into the nearest trash bin or shredder at the Flagstaff House, government has been put on notice that it doesn’t take a crowd to force a change. Sometimes all it takes is a few good men and women and children, prepared to take a “Stroll in the Park,” brave the elements and show no fear for fully-attired riot police!

Thanks, Mr. Essamuah for your “June 4 Opinion.” It reminds me of the statement ascribed to the murdered Thomas-a-Becket in T. S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral,” that:

We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
Men learn little from others’ experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns. Sever
The cord, shed the scale. Only
The fool, fixed in his folly, may think
He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

In Tunisia, it took just one man!

Yours faithfully,

Ace Anan Ankomah