FEATURE: HUNGER IN A FOOD STORE

HUNGER IN A FOOD STORE

A Feature on Northern Ghana by Edward Adeti, Upper East

 *HUNGER IS REAL

Hunger is an irresistible natural call for food which when prolonged can make a thief of any man. It is a silent robber who makes a helpless robber of the same victim it leaves behind. It could be one of the symptoms and signs of poverty, a common disease in a hungry zone like Ghana’s north where an average of 8 out of 10 people are not sure where the next meal fit for a human being will come from.

Hunger is real. World Bank’s current statistics on tackling poverty in northern Ghana indicate that 63% of the population within the zone are broke. Beyond the many fireside evening tales narrated by the African grandparents to their surrounding grandchildren and other kids from the neighbouring red huts, there is a factual story about a schoolboy who fainted one morning just when he was about to enter the school compound through the main gates.

He was rushed to the staff common room by some teachers who, through the various traditional revival methods they knew, managed to save him. A few minutes after regaining consciousness, the worried-looking teachers decided to survey his medical history by asking him why he fainted and if it was the first time it had happened to him. His friends were waiting outside, praying for his full healing.

Classmates, who knew this incident had never happened to the boy before, were anxious by the windows because the boy was a gifted young Mathematician who had been selflessly complementing the efforts of the Mathematics teachers by helping extremely slow learners whose career-killing and CV-depleting cases had been thrown out of the class by frustrated teachers. The children, who threaten career and who inspire teachers with the desire of a premature retirement by only succeeding in failing to pass from the same spot even when they are promoted, I mean students who make teachers doubt their calling and training or students who overturn a school into a mentor-tormentor relationship or stage, were those waiting around for the resurrection of their fallen saviour.

When the boy opened his mouth in reply, the words were inconceivable. He said he fainted because it was not his turn to take breakfast that morning in their house. The teachers opened their mouths wide in surprise and only remembered to close them when they noticed their least-welcome students or tormentors by the windows and sacked them at once and faraway like abomination. When the teachers returned to the revival scene from chasing after the scattered concerned and friendly spies, the recovered lonely and waiting boy shocked them further with almost the same background explanation that some honest but timid children today wish to whisper to someone who truly cares. 

His father had lost his blue-collar job as a security man some months back. The feeding of a family of seven mouths (five children and two parents) hinged solely on the few coins his mother struggled to earn from splitting firewood for a local canteen that needed financial salvation itself. Whilst his father searched for another job, poverty corroded the family to a breaking point where a timetable had to be drawn like a duty roster to determine and rotate which one person was due for breakfast, no lunch, but supper each day of the week. The one who took breakfast today might have his or her supper three days after but would not have breakfast again until the following week. Everyone, including the parents, had to endure in the long queue until it was his or her time to eat gently whilst the rest (including their father) only watched and scratched their dehydrated heads. It was already getting to the third day since the last time the boy ate at home and he had collapsed that morning when his body and brain could no longer bear it.

The faces one meets in the northern streets coupled with what I personally know and the stories I hear daily from individuals and families convince me vividly that hunger is probably more real or common than religion, books, politics and true love. I was returning home from work one stormy evening when a weepy boy called out from behind me. Believe me, this boy did not lie to me that he was hungry. After school hours, he goes to the street for help. Trust me— he is different from dishonest kids who enjoy begging. His long story is true. And there are a lot like him everywhere.

He has a common background with children who suffer childhood chronic hunger. As someone from the same underprivileged conditions myself, I can recognise a truly starving child when I see one. Although I do ask a few questions from the beginning, I love to help such children and adults with the little I have the way I wished some had helped me without suspicion. As a basic-level graduate and continuing student of that frightening and dislodging situation, I can detect a silent scream when I hear one.

This boy is one of the clever pupils at the Akantome Junior High School, a public school in Bolga. I was not surprised when I saw him several months later when he was chosen among the clever pupils in his school for this year’s Regional Showcase of the Project Citizen Ghana held in collaboration with the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) and the Ghana Education Service (GES) at the Catholic Social Centre in Bolga. It is possible that if this promising boy continues to fight his battle alone, hunger will steal his future from him.

There are a lot of issues ahead in this feature. The objective of doing this is to highlight the urgent need to individually and collectively to do something particularly in northern Ghana now about the silent robber before hunger does something about us…to finish hunger before hunger itself finishes us. I have looked across the horizons of the north and now bring you reasons why we are trapped where we are. I share the same hope expressed by Buzz Aldrin, an American astronaut, when he said, “If we can conquer space, we can conquer childhood hunger.”

*WHY SO MUCH HUNGER AND DEPRIVATION IN THE NORTH?

Are we poor because we are in the north or we are in the north because we are poor? It is like asking whether people are who they are because of where they are or they are where they are because of who are they are. More generally, we can ask ourselves if we are black because we are in Africa or we are in Africa because we are black. One could fix any adjectives in the same setting of the question to know whatever is wrong or right with someone. The answer will remain the same: people can be who they are because of where they are and they can be where they are because of who they are. The northern people are poor because they are in the north and they are in the north because they are poor. Regardless of the situation and the location of the people, there are reasons behind the issue affecting them. Those reasons are what this feature shall look at.

I am yet to come to terms with the reality that in spite of the abundant human and mineral resources in the north, we are still are poor and allow hunger to stare at us in the face. The three regions of Ghana’s north are so blessed with astonishingly talented and intelligent people as well as mineral and tourist deposits that the natives and the residents of the north should have no reason to feel hungry and inferior to anyone in any part of the globe. I am not so keen on reggae music but there is a lesson in what Bob Marley (1945-1981) says in one of his immortal songs. He says, “In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty.”

The north is hungry inside its own food store. Mismanagement and failure to tap and harness these resources have remained the bane of development in the north. Take a break and just have a look at a good number of northern Ghanaians who are strong pillars and proud international ambassadors in sports, education, politics, medicine, agriculture, religion, administration, media, music, movie, literature, hospitality, science and technology, law, military, security, business, diplomacy, et cetera. The list of the fields is as endless as the list of top-notch northerners who occupy and command those fields home and abroad.

The northerner is not an intellectual commoner. He can handle the highest office on the planet to a global standing ovation by the time he is ending his full term and bowing out into a well-deserved rest. All he needs is the self-confidence, the push and the enabling environment. History may be blaming the colonialists and successive governments for rather creating a disabling environment and a massive measure of chronic disadvantage that has remained a monster of underdevelopment in the north, borrowing from Oscar Wilde (an Irish writer and poet) who said “We have found the enemy at last, and it is us!”, the north itself has a fair share of the blame. We shall see that as we try to look at why the north is where it is, why its people are hungry and poor when they should not be.

The north is guilty but not condemned. The north is a victim and at the same time an accomplice of a crime committed against self in the company of the departed colonialists and successive governments. It is guilty of what the court explicitly recognises as “contributory negligence.” There are ten solid counts of charges why the north should be held in wake-up custody for decades of deliberate starvation inside its own food store. We shall look at the charges one after the other.

The suicidal manner in which our traditional funerals are performed could be the first charge. When someone dies in the north, he or she leaves behind ashes of a celebrated hunger. Relatives empty the food stores to entertain invitees and gatecrashers and execute all the animals in the house to pacify the gods all in the honour of someone who has died and is incapable of showing gratitude for afflicting his or her children with hunger in the name of honour. 

The impact is more serious on children whose schools do not benefit from the Ghana School Feeding Programme. Many children who could have been more useful in society cannot concentrate in class due to funeral-borne hunger. They are daily turning away from schools and pouring into the open streets and markets where they are training and doing distance learning as rebellious recruits and criminal robots.

The second charge has to do with the roads linking the three northern triplets (Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions). Although government has finally responded to the dry cry of the people, why did it take so long and why is the pace of work on those roads still so slow today under the watch of the northern politicians who should know better that a good road means safety, fast business and food security? Students, market women, people with disabilities, strangers, tourists and the aged are the worst-hit on what can be described as some of the most vehicle-unfriendly only roads that link Tamale and Bolga to Wa in particular. It is always a battle for the fittest as potential passengers rush for space and transport operators and monopolists take advantage, justifiably so because they must bear the maintenance that no potential competitor who does not want to expire would admire let alone to desire. The road conditions in the north also explain why food is needlessly scarce and expensive in the north.

There are a lot of people who are not encouraged to grow food crops and trade them beyond their regions simply because whilst the lasting package is missing, the smooth passage is also lacking. As luminaries who have attained the peak of the ladder, the northern politicians and well-heeled individuals of northern extract do not need a reminder that they ought to have gone beyond lip service by now in clearing and straightening the path for those behind them. The roads between Bolga to Bawku as well as those between Tamale and Yendi and Wa to Tumu leave much to be desired.

Ethnic conflict is the third charge. If big-time investors feared to do business in the north and if professionals reject posting to the north, it is most probably because of the conflict colours particularly in Bawku and Yendi. When anger enters, wisdom departs. Much in the same manner, when conflict enters and overstays, food security and development go into exile. 

When I went round during the Bawku ethnic unrest, I came across a lot of farms that had been orphaned and classrooms that had been emptied by the violent conflict. Hunger took over the desolate streets of the municipality and hungry families ran through the flames of the harsh curfew amid flying blind bullets to resettle in Bolga whose houses and schools eventually became choked with local refugees. Nothing encourages hunger to hang around like a fertile ground where the unavoidable conflict so rapidly matures into a needless bloodletting. Nothing scares development like a climate of fear really does. Huge sums of money that could have catered for development are being sunk into keeping security forces in places like Bawku, Yendi and Dagbon. And a lot more money went into social and infrastructural rebuilding processes here and there.  

Another charge is the absence of environmental conscience. The unfeeling attitude towards the environment is not peculiar to the north alone. The north has a quota being contributed to the same climate change that scourged its bare back with what will forever be remembered as the “August 2007 Northern Floods.” Hectares of farms that could have fed millions of mouths got drowned in the same water that could have been converted into a resource. The excess water from Burkina Faso’s Bagre Dam which annually floods our shores, farms and communities in the north can be directed and collected into a dam for hydropower, irrigation and tourism purposes. 

But who is pushing for that in the north? The only isolated voice on that idea so far is that of the Upper East Regional Minister, Mark Owen Woyongo. The wild flood will come again this year and it will affect lives and property as before because rivers across the north are still silted in bulk. Rather than prevent, we always wait to cure and to cry. Failure to turn the flooding into a blessing is north’s fifth charge for hunger and poverty.   Despite education and sensitisation through many outlets including the Ghana Environmental Management Project (GEMP) initiated by the Government of Canada and Ghana’s Ministry of Environment with the cooperation of the traditional rulers to combat drought and desertification towards food security, people still fell trees indiscriminately, set bush fires, engage in sand winning and illegal mining, farm close to water bodies and mishandle and misapply agrochemicals. These practices have perpetuated hunger, poverty, serious health hazards and underdevelopment in the north.

The sixth charge is underutilisation of the tourist deposits in the three regions. Except the Mole National Park in the Northern Region which seems to command patronage, the rest of the sites in the same region and the other two regions are getting far less than the expected amount of attention and revenue. There is a saying that people are addressed the way they are dressed. What more can the tourist boards in the north ask for from tourists if the sites are still where they are since creation? The north cannot demand much of the local and foreign tourists who visit its sites because the sites are not competitive and they basically lack the standard expansion to accommodate and entertain tourists.

The only difference between an average tourist site and a common museum in northern Ghana is that the objects of interest in the former are stationary whilst those in the latter are mobile. Period. Kulungugu in the Upper East was the site where Ghana’s first President escaped a bomb attack in 1962. The spot is referred to as the Kulungugu Bomb Site today. That is a tourist potential that could have pulled foreign tourists and Africans in the Diaspora considering Nkrumah’s international aura; but surprisingly, the north has not seen the need to capitalise on that historic site to feed itself to satisfaction.

Furthermore, the assemblies in the north over the years have refused to grow teeth to bite miscreants who cause mess everywhere. Houses without toilets far outnumber those that have, yet the assemblies only sit down and wait for common fund and financial assistance from donor partners whilst landlords who should be called to order are depriving tenants of decent toilets and tormenting them with house-rent increase that is uncalled for. The authorities in the north have refused to make more money for development by failing to slap a fine on individuals who abandon toilets and engage in open bend-down-strike because they want air to blow their buttocks (as some young men told me when I confronted them). The sanitation byelaws are as imaginary as fables. I wish hunger and sanitation-related deaths were rather imaginary and the byelaws as real as the air we breathe.

Recently, I was at the Bawku market where faceless people have converted empty market sheds into toilets and disposal sites. The sorts of faeces I came across whilst counting the number of empty sheds in the market were out of this world! About 830 sheds were filled with award-winning faeces that would make foreign tourists not want to extend their adventures into any local market in Ghana. Until I went there, I never knew faeces had their own kingdom, chiefs, tyrants and social classes. I saw the most horrific violence and oppression meted out to the bare face of the land by talented strikers. Judgement is coming. Health is wealth. If the north cannot guard its own health, where is its wealth? If the north will continue to live on a hill of filth, the time will soon catch up with it when the sick jobless population will outweigh the slim strong overstretched minority. 

 

Disregard for family planning is another offence with which I am charging the north. Many couples, in the name of culture and religion, produce more children than their farms can feed. A number among the growing hungry population who are singing in the streets for bread in the north encounter unwanted pregnancies which, if not hazardously aborted, add new members to the hungry population. 

Drunkenness, particularly among the youths, is the ninth offence that explains why poverty and hunger seem to be headquartered in the north. The more a young man consumes alcohol, the more he drains the energy and opportunities in his own life. Alcohol is killing and maiming a disturbing number of northern youths each moment that passes. There are a lot of men who do not feel or think the need to provide the basic food for their families. They prefer to either burn the money with cigarette fire or exchange it for bottles. They swagger back home at an ungodly hour and still demand supper.

Lateness to work and premature departure from work is the tenth offence that accounts for the banner of hunger that the north boldly carries with a bowed head. The same attitude is what influences how we schedule our meetings. Although this canker is also not peculiar to the north, an already-deprived zone like the north needs not feel comfortable with the now-normal habit or subculture of appearing late at work and functions. They say in China, meetings are started with coffee; but in Ghana, meetings begin with apologies for late start.

And even after the delayed functions finally have started, the biography-size introduction of the chairperson is as long as the journey from “Odododiodioo” to “Waaaaaaaaaa!” Then, in the end, someone will give a repetitive vote of thanks like a kindergarten poem as if someone would sue the event organisers for not showing public gratitude for attending. The north still does not appreciate the fact that time is a resource. Time is money. 

The north is yet to realise that things must be done fast and cautiously if it must catch up with the rest and the best in the west. A word to the wise is in the north.  When we pretend to cry, the donor will pretend to help. That is why some of the so-called intervention programmes that successive governments have seen at last proved to be interference programmes. 

I commend the NDC and the NPP for the School Feeding Programme but I wish to draw their attention to the fact that the inclusion of more schools even in endowed regions whilst a great number in the rural areas still prepare for the MDGs on empty stomachs from the time of the NPP to the time of the NDC makes me think that the intervention is shifting from “School Feeding Programme” to “Spoon Feeding Programme.” We can save the north to serve the nation and the world better.

*CONCLUSION― "A WORD TO THE WISE IS IN THE NORTH"

These ten reasons, and probably more, explain why hunger and malnutrition will remain in the north. Whether we believe or not, chronic hunger is real. The situation is serious as girls from starving homes are being forced into marriage with men as twice old as their fathers. I was inside a bus at Bawku one day, preparing to return to Bolga, when about seven container-bearing children came around to beg.

Two of them, between 12 and 13 years, had a burning cigarette stick in their mouths each. There was one among them whose life in my observation rather needs formatting, not counselling. They might have come from different homes but probably from the same hungry background. No one gave them anything, yet they did not show any worry for not receiving. The next thing I saw was they suddenly plunged into a wild catch-me-if-you-can play in the midst of the busy traffic. As the bus began to move, I thought about what could be their next source of food if still no one gave them anything and what the future might hold for them and for the hungry, half-naked kids everywhere.

I know that all children are humans, irrespective of their backgrounds, and they can be refined into any great people with the same fire that refines the buried rough gold. Perhaps, if the north could turn at its food store and manage it properly, there would be fewer promising children in the streets with more of them in the classrooms, and the story of our world in the north and of the silent torture of hunger and its roots would change as the Millennium Development Goals near the goalposts of hope and a new dawn everywhere there is a child and a family. A word to the wise is in the north. Perhaps, I will establish an NGO someday, and call it “Food Extension for Education to the Deprived”― FEED