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For millions of rich and middle-class people in Ghanaians, the lockdown is almost an enforced period of recreation or a chance for self-improvement. Time to enroll for an online art appreciation course, learn the intricacies of cooking, take up gardening, learn a language, take up the guitar, go for detox by eating healthy food.
If, like me, you have a live-in maid who happens to have picked up some beautician skills, you are “condemned” to confinement in a spa. Shall I have a facial today? Or a pedicure? No, let’s settle for a massage. It will relieve my lockdown
The fridge is well stocked with food. Not, I hasten to add, because I have hoarded – I very deliberately refused to do something so cheap – but because I happened to do a big shop just a few days before Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo Addo announced a partial lockdown. There is more wine, along with single malt, vodka, and rum.
What the lockdown has done, just two days in is to magnify a hundredfold the social inequality in Ghanaians until you feel as though it is screaming at you, wild-eyed and with bared teeth.
Social inequality has always been extreme here. Nothing new about that. Waiting at the traffic lights in your air-conditioned car (a kind of gleaming sealed egg, as novelist Aravind Adiga puts it in White Tiger), in your nice fresh clothes on your way to meet a friend for lunch at an elegant restaurant that is going to cost what could feed a family of four for a month, a man comes up to the window selling slices of coconut or crisps and that he earns in a day will go towards feeding his family, if he is lucky.
With the lockdown, the man at the traffic lights has been immobilised. The lives of millions and millions of Ghanaians are being shattered by the lockdown to an unimaginable degree and the contrast between their suffering and those who can comfortably ride out this storm is so sharp that it provokes an intake of breath. In Europe and the US where societies are more egalitarian, the lockdown experience is not marked by the same sharp disparities as in Ghanaians.
We are staying indoors, all cozy and cocooned in our nice spacious homes with sofas and lamps, snug as a bug in a rug and busy on our laptops and phones, safe and protected. The poor have been thrown to the wolves. The government is doing its best to offer relief to help them survive but they are in extremis in every single respect: no work, money or food and, in many cases no family around for affection and support.
Casual workers are paid by the day. If they don’t work for a day, their wallets are empty. The first thing you notice when you walk into the home of a poor Ghanain is the absence of any processed or packaged foods. There are no jars, packets, bottles or boxes, nothing that can last. No packet of biscuits or noodles or a can of beans. There is never enough money to buy these superfluous items; the money is enough only for the vegetables or dal needed for one meal, and even the quantity of that meal is carefully calibrated to appetite as there is no fridge to keep any leftovers.
If they need medicines, they ask the chemist for the number of pills – paracetamol, say – they need for that day rather than buying a strip.
The crucial difference is that the poor have no buffer, no reserves of anything, whether money, food or medicines. Life is lived on the edge. While we can talk with our loved ones in other cities or countries on video calls or Facetime, they won’t have smartphones or won’t have the money to pay for packages with enough bandwidth
The lockdown is necessary, no doubt, but it is a catastrophe for poor Ghanaians. Some families at least live together in urban slums, but millions of migrant labourers are separated from their wives, parents and children back in the village. Lockdown means being confined to dingy cells that pass for rented accommodation, usually shared with six or seven other labourers.
In pre-Covid-19 days, they could spend some time outside these cells, chatting with others on the stairs or landings of their tenements, inhaling some of Accra particulate matter. Now social distancing has made even that impossible.
The lockdown has stripped the poor of the one thing that allowed them to hang on to a shred of dignity: work. When a poor Ghanaian saw a rich man rushing off to work in his car, getting busy to support his family, he could feel that he too was working to be able to put food on the table that evening for his children. The lockdown has taken away this function and rendered him truly helpless.
Weirdest of all, none of this suffering is visible. Homebound as the rich are, the poor have become truly invisible, They have been walled off. And yet you can feel it. In one passage,Gonna(Homeless) talks of how, as a child, he could experience the Easter heat outside more intensely and vividly, lying inside his darkened bedroom, than he could if he had been outside in the bright sunshine. That is what some of us are feeling now, safe inside our homes while the suffering happens outside somewhere.
And yet … yet, true to habit, trivial thoughts keep intruding. What if I can’t get any hair dye? I don’t want to emerge from the lockdown looking like a badge.
I'm writing this piece of article when I first saw the plight of Head potters trying to make Ends meet.
My name is Ntiamoah Martin,
Bachelors Degree in psychology and foundation of Education,UCC
A teacher by profession
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