MARKETING GHANA: BETWEEN OBAMA, FACEBOOK DEBATES, STRAY COWS AND TOILET WARS!! (Part III)

The Visit
When I heard that Obama would be visiting Ghana, I was over the moon. This was THE cool man, coming to THE cool country and visiting THE cool city. I hurried home from a trip to his country, just to be here and feel his presence. To me, the trip was all that I expected it to be, except in one material particular. Obama denied us the opportunity to pull the biggest crowd that he would ever have seen in his life, when post-9/11 security concerns did not permit a Clinton-style outdoor event. I am told that in 1998, Clinton pulled about 500,000 people to the Black Star Square (which by the way, received a significant poetic mention by no mean a person than Maya Angelou, and at no mean event than Michael Jackson’s funeral service). Obama could have pulled 10 times that crowd, easily, to confound the noise that was made when he pulled 700,000 in Oregon and 200,000 in Germany, during the campaign. Somehow the Sadam Hussein/Osama bin Laden combi denied both Obama and Ghanaians such a history-making and record-shattering event.

Those security concerns meant that majority of Ghanaians, including my humble self, could only watch Obama on home TVs. Having only to watch him on TV, Obama could have been anywhere in the world. But we knew that he was HERE, for three main reasons. First, traffic movement in Accra was restricted on account of blocked roads, making it wiser to stay at home and expect that there would be no power cuts. Second, we had witnessed roads being fixed at midnight with floodlights, and a hospital and a King’s palace were refurbished and repainted with great speed. I hear, and it is probably not true, that a world leader once said: “all Third World countries have the same smell – the smell of fresh paint.”

The third reason (and how could we ever forget that he was in Ghana?) was the pathetically poor picture and sound quality that GTV and MetroTV conspired to inflict on us. There was absolutely no excuse for that shambolic performance. Those TV stations humiliated Ghana, and it was painful watching major networks like CNN, BBC and Sky, carrying the awful live pool feed with a disclaimer: that the poor quality was from the “source”. It hurts to think that people were paid to transmit that picture and sound quality, which did not even sync. I am convinced that even my mobile phone could have done a better job. Being as smart as they are, those more serious news networks did their own filming and immediately threw whatever they recorded from our feed into the trash bin, so that their playbacks of the event were crystal clear.

I will not go too much into what Obama had to say to us. Let’s just say that only a black man could have said that to Africa. Neither Bill Clinton nor George Bush (nor any American President before them) summoned enough guts (or maybe even cojones) to say what Obama said to us, to us in our face. And, if this had been John McCain, we would have jumped up and down on his bare back and screamed “don’t you dare patronize us.” Why? Those past American Presidents might look like each other on dollar notes, but they don’t have enough melanin! But this was one of our own, a son of the African soil with African blood running through his veins, telling us the painful home truth, from his heart, and his famous Teleprompters, that we are responsible for our own fate. Oh, and some even felt that he delivered the speech ex tempore. That is Barack Obama. And whilst at it, can someone buy Teleprompters for our Presidents, for now and the future? Teleprompters are cool, just like Cape Coast.

Then Obama went to Cape Coast, where he was given a tour of the Cape Coast Castle by Comedian-Turned-MP-Turned-Castle-Tour-Guide, Fritz Baffour. Obama was also interviewed by Anderson Cooper for CNN and Adam Boulton for Sky News. It was great seeing Cape Coast’s name on TV when the most important person on earth, Obama, was being interviewed. My Fante-ness was in full flow. I felt warm and cold at the same time. This was it – Obama was marketing Cape Coast (and Ghana) for us, for free. Every news organisation on earth, worth its salt (even FoxNews and Wall Street Journal, even if reluctantly), was focusing on us. I went into a romantic overdrive. My head was a tad reluctant to get involved, but my heart was busy telling my head to “stay at home and stop interfering,” as Edward Monkton would have put it. This was our opportunity to milk the event and sustain the attention on Ghana, particularly our tourism potential. I thought that it was time to brand Ghana the way Malaysia is ‘Truly Asia’ and India is ‘!ncredible’. “Get on CNN the way Angola is marketing CAN 2010!” I screamed.