If you see me in one way or the other begging, please don't be surprised, am not too ashamed of my status as a beggar. I am so because mendicacy is a chronic hereditary disease in my family as a Ghanaian.
Dad genetically borrowed mendicity from my granddad when he couldn't be any different from working for the whites in the gold mines. He offered them all he had in his bones as energy to cook wealth and lick the remains of the pot as his salary. When he woke up as early as 4am to work and gets back home as late as 9pm only to wake up and come back again with empty hands and stomach crediting foodstuffs from Auntie Julie's grocery shop.
At the end of the month,he stretches his begging hands only to be offered 1/10000 of his sweat as his most honourable reward for 100000J of energy used. On his pay days we all stay awake and gathered around the TV set which best telecast only one boring station, GTV. We will all make our list of books and items to be purchased and lay ambush for the already spent salary.
The salary is unruly dumped on the centre table in our living room when he returned home, Mum will first welcome him in that her voice which was heard only at the end of the months, in the rest of the days she sounded different and more like a lioness. In the most grand style, supper will be served to the poor begging gold mine worker and he will eat with mouth unwilling to swallow the balls of fufu.
Whiles he ate, Mum will draw a knife into the salary and start cutting it into different portions, the greater fraction normally went to Auntie Julie for the food we had consumed on credit, so that we can be allowed to eat again for the month ahead. Other parts went into our school fees and other utility bills. My Dad after eating will throw his discomfited self backwards into his lazy chair and ask my Mum if there is any remainder after doing what we all know is ineluctable.
On lucky months we have some left for our lenghty list that most times stand on four pages. Dad will first ask for our list, He normally will scream or laugh uncontrollably upon seeing our pages of items and will then instruct us to tabulate our list into 'WANTS' and 'NEEDS'. So right from infancy I have known the clear difference between want and need and have been warned to always cry for the needs and allow the wants to go searching for themselves.
So from my basic education to now, I have always been surviving on my needs but I dream of my wants and get to use them in dreamland, morning normally comes to wake and separate me from my sweet world of my wants. I remeber one day in my second world, I was using my own calculator, had for the first time a pair of newly bought sandals and was not wearing those ones my cousin had gifted me. I had not attended the dinning hall and was enjoying canteen food with the 'Dada mba', had a new school bag and was smiling and conversing happily with no worries planted on my face, Snr Labat please wake up, it is time for dorm dressing, then I realized I was again dreaming. Yes all those were my wants. To my father, your school fees, books and transportation back home are the needs, Period.
Growing up, when Life started advising me, I decided to also take upon myself the job which had fed the stomachs of my ancestors. Beggary in labour. So now am a beggar. I work hard for people and after which I beg them for my meagre salary. They somtimes tell me in my face that we can't pay you because we have not fed our families.
We resort to strike, hit the floors of the street and cry out our hunger, most times they listen with their right ears but during unfortunate days, they listen with the left ears and it appears we never will get paid. In other words, they are telling us to keep striking till we will realize we are harming nobody but ourselves since none of their relatives live in the country or is affected.
It is a miserable reason why I can't stop begging, just like ASUU.
Written By: Oppong Clifford Benjamin
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