Sydney Casely-Hayford writes; King rat

Let me spin you a story, from a long time ago in my life. Many decades ago as a young lad who had just entered Accra Academy in 1966, I was courted by an old friend, now deceased, to become a Boy Scout. Berko is long gone, but he made an impact on my life, especially because my recruitment into Accra Academy Boy Scouts was premised on the possibility that I might be a good gay fodder for the leader.

I was very young and I dare say, a very sweet chap at the time, but very clear on my sexuality. Anyway, I was recruited into the scouts and rose to be it’s eventual leader and I dare say a very good scout in the end.

But this story is not about Berko, it is about Percival (his real name, also deceased), which story is sad, but very relevant in my life today.

We were at camp in Aburi, camping and training for the upcoming inter-scout marching and activity competition and the stakes were high; we were the incumbent champions for the past three years wanting to stamp our authority on the event. Little did we know after we had pitched tents in the evening that this was to be marred with a major calamity.

Percival and I were the quartermasters for the weekend, and we had the responsibility to keep the campsite clean and the scouts happily fed.

We had just finished the night meal and wrapped up with cleaning and storing and Percy was going to throw the discarded food into a hole and tidy up. I headed for my tent.

I didn’t get there. From behind, screaming and yelling, a person in extreme agony and distress. I grabbed a stick and cutlass and started running back towards the quartermaster tent, from whence the shouting. In my wake, Berko and a few others all scared but boldly racing to assist.

The sight was not pretty. Percy is in a pool of blood, writhing and grabbing his crotch, totally out of it, blood-filled hands, bloodied thighs and legs, blood streaming all down to his feet and a pool of blood, making a really gory picture.

There was no one in sight, just Percy on the floor, staring at his crotch and screaming beyond understanding. Well we understood the blood meant he was hurt, but nowhere in the known about how it had gotten there.

Emergency treatment and a bandage over the damaged parts and we headed to the hospital for emergency care.

So this is what had happened. Percy had gone to change into his cloth, wrapped and tied to his neck as we do in the home, and with bowl in hand went out to the trash bin. On the way he sees this very hungry dog and decides to do a good deed by feeding it. So, he squats to put the food on the ground and the mangy dog, too hungry to wait, lunges at his hand, misses and instead, gets Percy’s hanging penis between his thighs. Too hungry to let go, the dog bites and tugs and virtually takes the head off Percy’s organ. This is what started the yelling.

By the time we leave the hospital, a traumatized Percy is sedated and we have to carry him back to camp. We decide to keep watch over him in turns, and make a decision in the morning whether to return to school or stay in camp.

But here is the better part of the story. The nurse on duty did a crude job with the stitching back of Percy’s “penis head” and this left him with a bolus on the end, but a larger bolus than normal. In his period of growth, Percy’s organ extended a little above average and with limited sensitivity in the head, he had this new thrust that in arousal, his organ became much harder and he had a lot more staying power because of the reduced sensitivity.

Now, women you know what I am talking about; it is a man’s greatest dream, to stay hard for the longest possible time.

Percy had always had a problem pulling the chicks and he drifted to me, to approach through my connections, and the news spread with some great marketing messages and before we knew it, Percy was the dream machine. Now he was calling the shots and assumed “King Rat”.

From an accident of fate, Percy had taken on the mantle of the procreation machine, women’s pleasure machine and man’s ego machine. Supreme power.

But try as much as he did, he could not really rise to the occasion and soon realized that it was not only the “instruct” and “direct”. He had fallen into a role that was not his to have and his natural shy self and insecurity just could not get him that creativity to deliver the expected.

Now I tell the story of learning at camp. One of the things we learnt very quickly was that rats and mice love leftover food. So we would dig a pit and throw the food into it, but lined with tarpaulin, so rats that jumped into the pit could not come out.

When the food is finished, the hungry rats would start feeding on each other in a vicious food chain. The strong ones dominate until last one standing and he becomes “King Rat”. But King Rat will also eventually have to die, especially when there is nothing more to feed on.

And that is what we are seeing in Ghana. When you annihilate all in sight to stay in power, eventually it will all come to an end. I was appalled to see and hear NDC General Secretary Johnson Asiedu Nketiah jumping in to defend the discovery that there are Togolese persons on our voters’ register.

In what I deem very infantile and unnecessary defense of the situation except that you would want to do that to protect yourself, Asiedu Nketiah was at best a joker in a concert party within a serious ecosystem of political integrity for the people of this country.

I have to remind our politicians that if you cheat, it will all come out one day. I know it for a fact that, at one point in our voting, the NDC party used to go to villages and register the names of all the dead persons they could find in the cemetery. I am also in the know that the NPP had their schemes.

But what is this really all about? Both parties are involved in cheating to get into position to govern. When they get there, there is no governing. The people are fed up, tired of the back and forward of economic descent and with vague and unmet promises, we just simply feed fat off the donations offered during elections and wait for the next round.

So the economic cycle is the politicians find money from wherever, prior to elections, give to the electorate, take it back after they are in government and we start another cycle after four years. The politician must make enough money to cover his debts and put enough away for the next election. Hence, bloated projects, schemes to skim off the top and a lack of focus of goals and objectives.

Then when they become King Rat and there is no more rat fat to feed on, they turn on each other and devour themselves so they are the only ones remaining.

We as citizens of Ghana have a choice to make. If there is nothing left to feed on, the King Rat will retire. We have to plug all the holes, which make it easy for the politics to be played into the pockets of the greedy ones and fix the laws and let our institutions, work to the max.

The Ghana Medical Association has called off their strike. I say well done to civilized minds. We need more critical thinking.

Just as we all get a wake up call when it is discovered that we doped to win a race, so will this all be unraveled one day. Same way if you cheat into what is not yours, it shows up in your inability to deliver, because that is not your bent. Where is Iddi Amin today?

King Rat cannot stay there forever when the rat population is exterminated or deserts. What we have to do is push for a single ID and single Database to manage our identity, not this farce of a multi-id system we are running.

Ghana, Aha a y? din papa. Alius atrox week advenio. Another terrible week to come!