By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

In the aftermath of President Barack H. Obama’s whirlwind tour of Ghana this July, Ghana’s Information minister, Ms. Zita Okaikoi, was reported to have caviled the state-run Ghana Television (GTV) for woefully failing to capture and beam qualitative pictures and sound to both the local and international media. Some critics of GTV were also reported to have asserted that such poor technical production was “a source of great embarrassment to [Ghana]” (See “Obama Visit: Information Minister Lauds Organization, Blames GTV” MyJoyOnline.com 7/13/09).

For a Third-World country like Ghana, this is no news to write home about, as the cliché goes; to be certain, it was all to be expected. What matters here, to be certain, regards Ms. Okaikoi’s preparatory role in ensuring that GTV lived up to her expectations, as a cabinet member with a portfolio which includes supervising the performance of our national broadcaster. At any rate, but for the ruling National Democratic Congress’ unsavory penchant for populist pseudo-socialism, coverage of President Obama’s visit ought to have been contracted to a more efficient and reputable media organization, preferably a private broadcaster. This is what a free-market democratic culture is about, the healthy promotion and encouragement of competition in order to ensure a cost-effective execution of such landmark projects as the Obama visit.

Still, narratives retailing the evidently chronic incompetence of GTV are legion and endless. For instance, in either 1984 or 1985 while participating in a GBC-TV program at the Corporation’s Senior-Staff Club House, near the Flagstaff House, an avoidable incident occurred that painfully haunted this writer, then a performance-poetry artist, for quite a heck of a long time. On the occasion at issue, the main artistic draw, or star of the program, was Mr. Ola Williams, a baritonic gospel crooner who also had a day job working at a commercial bank in Central Accra. I have since been informed of Mr. Williams’ tragic and untimely demise.

Anyway, the incident in question regarded a visiting Chinese technical team that was in the country to assist with the installation of new media equipment recently acquired by GBC-TV, as it was then called. On this particular Saturday afternoon, the Chinese technical team of some three personnel had been invited to enjoy the regularly televised entertainment program perennially hosted by Mr. Godwin Avenorgbor (“Big Goddy”) and got seated to the front of the audience, next to the open performance arena; there was no formally constructed stage as such. I sat just next to these Chinese engineers underneath a big tree.

Not very long after they had been seated, a bar orderly of the GBC Senior-Staff Club House came to us with what appeared to be a pink-, or red-, colored soft drink which had already been poured into three drinking glasses. It was what happened next that became a lingering source of embarrassment for me.

In the process of placing each Chinese gentleman’s drink directly in front of him, the orderly, for some curiously inexplicable reason, stuck his right thumb at the brim of one of the drinking glasses. Almost immediately, the leader of the trio, who would later be introduced to the audience, subtily winked and nodded his utter disapproval to his two colleagues who, in turn, nodded their disapproving assent. Their drinks would sit in front of these gentlemen for about an hour, with an occasional fly buzzing about the glasses and even one or two landing on their rims, until the bar orderly returned, visibly surprised and, perhaps, even somewhat agitated and carried away the drinks.

What crossed my mind, then, concerned the fact that the server, a male who looked to be either in his late twenties or early thirties, could also not have presented the three Chinese gentlemen with a corked full bottle of his nondescript wine, or whatever that was, and uncorked it before his guests. It also acutely puzzled me that a bar employee of the GBC Senior-Staff Club House would actually be hired without the acquisition of even the most marginal, or rudimentary, of table manners.

Perhaps it might be well worth our while to soberly and honestly accept the all-too-pedestrian fact that the efficient application of modern technology never quite took off in the land. And there is absolutely nothing embarrassing about such an honest admission; except, of course, that these days, honesty appears to have deafeningly deserted our enclave of the Gulf of Guinea.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), the pro-democracy think tank, and the author of 20 books, including “Obaasima: Ideal Woman” (iUniverse.com, 2005), a volume of poetry. E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###