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Really, it’s always nice to be back home, though it is also kind of painful to leave all those conveniences behind and head towards confusion and underdevelopment.

As our British Airways   B777 started moving into position for take-off, I could not help but marvel yet again at the complex modern travel organism called the airport.

Heathrow, as one of the Mother-of-all-airports never fails mesmerize. Right behind us was a B747 Jumbo also readying for take-off. That huge creature, the size of several buildings, all four engines firing away, with so much weight – its own, the passengers and freight – would soon be airborne like a bird… I reached for my camera…

Our Captain was a lady and she reassuringly spoke to us, describing our take-off, safety requirements, initial flight path and cruising height. I was elated. I always am when the captain is a woman. She took us off into the air smoothly and we soon attained cruising height.

I settled in nicely with my headphones piping in music from the classical/opera channels and pulled out a book I had just bought: CLASSIC EPHEMERA: A MUSICAL MISCELLENY” published by Classic FM.
I took a few sips from the first round of refreshments and started reading from the book.

Lunch was soon served and before long, that too was over and the trays taken away. I went back to my book, but I soon drifted away into the reveries of my homeland Ghana where in a few hours time we would be landing…

So what happened? I kept asking myself. When we sent the British packing in 1957, a good half a century and more ago, we had working systems: a civil service, local government, a functioning railway system, a postal system, an educational system, a public transport system, a healthcare delivery system, a relatively incorruptible police service – all the systems they had on the British Isle that kept the island on the move;

those same systems that today have been improved upon to provide the conveniences we so admire in the advanced countries but lack in our own. So what really happened fifty years down the line that we have collapsed all the systems?

Many Ghanaians would remember how letters (and telegrams!) were delivered at home because house addresses worked; how buses run on time on numbered routes; how it was such a joy to travel from Accra to Kumasi by train – generally how we were advancing…

And then it all stopped and we started gliding into sloth, mediocrity, laziness, excuse-making, self-hate, coups and the underdevelopment we now find ourselves in. Let’s face it; it started even when the “greatest African who ever lived”, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was in power.

I agree it is not fashionable to speak “evil” of Nkrumah, but sooner or later, Ghana and Ghanaians would have to face up to the “inconvenient truth”. By the time the soldiers were done with their “Liberation”, “Redemption”, “Revolutionary” and “Defence” councils, we were well and truly mired in the quagmire of underdevelopment…

These were some of the reveries that kept competing with my attention to the music piping into my ears, and the words jumping at me from the book I was looking at all the way until we touched down at the Kotoka (oh yes, he that who overthrew the greatest African who ever lived) International Airport.

But it was not with pessimism, I was actually flooded with joy and hope that I was back home…
To be continued…

By Alhaji Abdul-Rahman Harruna Attah