I was talking to a person born and bred at Ho, in the Volta Region, about the impressions I gathered after visiting the town for the first time.

I said, "I didn’t know that Ho was such a beautiful place. The town is surrounded by wooded hills all around. And the main roads are of highway quality. It’s getting there that poses serious problems to the motorist.”

My friend agreed and then proudly proclaimed, “Ho is the oxygen city of Ghana!”

I think he’s right! The city is very clean. And very well planned. The buildings on the hills deserve to be there. They please the eye as one follows them from hill to hill in the course of visiting one’s chosen venues one after the other.

I think the various administrations under which the city has been lucky enough to flourish deserve the greatest credit.

You see, Ghana is now virtually under a social regime of grab and ruin. Many administrators, appointed to preserve the beauty of the past in the places where they serve and to allow themselves to be inspired by past splendour to emulate their predecessors or even do better than them, do not scruple to light the fires of “entropy.” And once things begin to ‘fall apart’, the “centre cannot hold”! Apparently, my friend had read Chinua Achebe and nodded in agreement.

Ho has been able to escape Ghana’s cankerous trend towards decay. And I say Ayekoo to the men and women who have not allowed themselves to shrug their shoulders and claim fatalistically that “nothing can be done!”

So much so that a private citizen, who would not know ‘public relations’ hype if it was presented to him on a platter, voluntarily'rebrands’ the city, with impressive precision, as “the oxygen city of Ghana.”

I was there to take part in a symposium organised by the Ghana Journalists Association as part of its 75th anniversary celebrations. I was bowled over by the idea conceived by its executive committee—not to allow Accra to monopolise the celebrations to the exclusion of the other regional capitals or centres in Ghana.

Our theme, in short, was how to build on the “excellence” of the past to safeguard the “future” of our art—or craft—of journalism.

Kumasi was the first regional capital to follow the introductory lecture in Accra. Ho was next. Wasn’t the choice eccentric? Would there even be an adequate number of journalists there to make the city a worthwhile choice of venue?

I am glad the GJA executive ignored the the doubting Thomases and took us to Ho. Apart from the surprise, we all got to find that it was a city so pleasing to the eye, and we also found the human material pretty solid. Our rather loquacious MC was able to locate and “recognise” about ten men and women whom he described as ‘former journalists’.

Our presentations were also excellent. Prof. Kwame Karikari, a former Director-General of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, gave a magnificent account of the journalistic scene in Ghana, a subject treated in a more detailed manner by another academic, Dr. Segbefia.

On meeting Dr Segbefia, I realised how paltry news about journalists is in Ghana. I told him I had worked with his elder brother, Charles Segbefia, for three years in the newsroom of Radio Ghana. He then let me know that
Sadly, Charles had passed—about four years ago!

I often ponder that it's dangerous, if one has lived abroad for any length of time, to ask about some of the people in Ghana whom one has left behind.

So many of them die, unnoticed, by our celebrity-crazy media.It’s as if if you don’t advertise yourself, you don’t exist. Or that your contribution to Ghana’s development wasn’t worth noticing. Perhaps our news editors ought to read their own advertising pages more dutifully. News of deaths that the news pages don’t record often gets presented there.

Talking about that, it was at Ho that I learned that two very prominent former news readers at Radio Ghana—Robert Owusu and Ashie Kotey—had sadly embarked on the journey to the unknown a few days ago!

Anyway, I’ve only got enough space today to convey to readers the atmosphere and flavor of our symposium. But I shall, God willing, do a proper report at a future date.

But before I go, I need to draw your attention to one of the latest heartbreaking stories about how galamsey is forcing our people to use dangerous, polluted water for drinking and cooking purposes. Please Google corn dough + polluted water + galamsey + alum.