I have come to accept that it takes more than being blessed by the supreme being to live a modicum of life deserving of a human being in this part of the earth. It becomes even more herculean when you make your bread as a civil or a public servant. If you the ordinary man dreams of a small Korean ‘Tico’ so you could give a decent ride to your place of worship at the weekend.
It seems the powers that control your very being : your mind, your intestines, how you should feel in spite of the condition they force you to live in ; would fervently desire that you wouldn’t think of owning a car. Putting myself in their place , I think it makes sense for the powers to make it as an almost a high treason offence when the ordinary man ever desired to own a car.
The more people that own a car in this country, the more louder the call would be to the powers to leave their comfort zone to get to work to construct more roads and to expand existing ones to cater for the emerging traffic. You know the powers do not like to get to the fields with us. They just want to be in their frozen offices and take their pay. That is why they would not provide any incentive to the public servant to acquire his own transport even though they make such promises on political campaign platforms.
The powers wish we were in those days. They would wish yours truly would commute from home to work on a ‘one tyre’ transport manned by one of our young men who would want to avoid being labeled as idle and so make their day building their muscles. You my friend would sit on some rugs on this ‘one tyre’ vehicle with your own ‘ macho’ man hauling you through the gullies called roads to and fro work. The rulership would call this service ‘ presidential special initiative in ‘one- tyre ‘ transport’.You would never miss evening church service just to thank your God for holding you a piece for the day.
And if you get tired of the life they forced you to live in; and you decide you would annoy them anyway by acquiring your own vehicle , then you must be ready to pay by your throat.
Importers say a car as imported should not ordinarily cost the last buyer so much. But the powers’ desire not to allow the ordinary man acquire his own car so he would start asking for his share of the new oil find, had decided to extort from the importer punitive tax on every imported car. That is the reason why a car as it cost in our markets is three or four times as it cost in its origin of import.
And so the ordinary man must pay through his nose in his desire to acquire car . You might sell your soul to some ‘Shylock financial institution’ just to acquire this car. By the time you finish paying for this car, your wife and children would admit you to the psychiatric hospital. Because after buying the car, you haven’t been able to do what is expected after one has acquired such a priceless property. You would always complain you do not have the money to buy the fuel into the car to give your wife that ‘jolly’ ride.
Mind you, every gallon of fuel you buy into your car, a close to fifty percent of the cost is government tax. The wicked powers would want you to sweat it out just to drive your car in town for daring to go against their intent to disallow any comfort for the ordinary man. Worst still, whilst your family is running out of patience for your inability to frequently give them a ride in the new car because you cannot buy the fuel, you are also unable to meet your financial obligations as you used to because bank lenders are taking away monthly almost all you have to redeem your indebtedness to them for the money they gave you to buy the car.
Meanwhile, you are not yet healed off your ordeal whilst trying to register your car. In this part of our land, we have not found the intelligence to put in a system that would provide ease for anyone to register a car that he has duely acquired. It seems the powers that control us have allowed an illegitimate system to be runned by some men and women known as ‘goro’ boys along side the main system. I think the powers have allowed that system to fester on because they believe that that illegitimate system provides jobs for some idle hands. They are short of calling it ‘presidential initiative in registering vehicles’. That must explains why the powers have allowed the chaos involved in the system of registering vehicles to persist.
I think the supposed witches and wizards of our world have in deed transformed themselves in suit of modernity. They have ascended to high places. They want to see us remain down there. They want to keep to themselves all the proceeds that accrue from our oil find, our cocoa and even proceeds of the precious minerals dug out from the land of our birth. They always say that the state is expending too much on the servant of the public. That a large percentage of taxes that come to government is used to pay the servant of the public.
That the servant of the people whose burden it is to singularly implement the out – of tune policies that come from the powers does not deserve more. And I don’t know why they are making us believe that the country solely depends on taxes. What about the export proceeds from cocoa, gold , diamond , oil etc etc. And what about the ‘ pimpimpimpim’ loans that they take everywhere; even in a hair salon? Doesn’t the servant of the public deserve a share in all these ‘ big big monies’ they go for?What do they do with these monies? Our expectant wives go to the clinic and they are hauled unto wooden planks so the doctors can finger- check them. What sin did the ordinary man commit?
If the powers do not want to lift a finger to make the servant of the people have a semblance of life; if they continue to make it difficult through policies for us not to acquire something as basic as a car; then they are just not anti- the public servant; they must be delighting in our woes like our familiar witches and wizards. PAUL ZOWONU TUTOR- ACCRA.
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