Friday, 12 March 2010

The Girl Behind Ghana's Looming Energy Crisis

If you live in Accra, you should be questioning why your lights keep going off, why "energy crisis looms" and why your taps don't flow.

Well, yesterday in the Volta Region, I saw this young woman fetching all the water from the Volta Lake. Yes. She's the guilty one :) I doubt she pays water bills but she fetches all the water. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty as hell.

Don't you wish the problem was as simple as that?

On a more serious note, I think Ghana can no longer depend on Mother Nature to run. We need to be proactive. We are too intelligent and too blessed as a people to be depending on rain to grow our crops, rain to get electricity, rain to get water to drink. And in the midst of all these perils, we keep chopping down our trees. What is wrong with us? What happened to those trees infront of the Kama Conference Centre in Nyaniba? Whose bright idea was it to start chopping them down?
I still haven't forgiven whoever chopped down that big tree at the Togo Embassy Junction in Cantonments. It's hard to forgive them when they put up such horrible art in that place. I still wonder whose brilliant idea that was.

And please can someone tell them to remove those "Millenium City" signage around the Independence Arch, I bet anybody who sees those will think we have no good artists, architects and designers in this country. Sometimes, it does get embarrassing.

We are already 24 million and rising. Now we need, less talk and more action. Even if the action is going to be "slow but sure" please let it happen. We can't go on like this.