Development and the holiday mentality

E. Ablorh-Odjidja
July 01, 2009

We have celebrated our achievements to date with holidays, including those non-achievement ones. Thus, today, July 1st, is our Republic Day.
 
Interspersed with all the celebratory days other are the rush for funeral days, considered celebratory days bar none.

 All counted, we end producing a lot of non-working days in a year.

I was talking about the subject of holidays to one of Ghana’s "brainiacs" the other day. The result is a revealing insight as to how many unproductive days we spend as holidays in any given year.

He said, “Don’t count your regular ones. Those are given. No need to worry about those. Worry about the unseen ones that will be added later as the year and the landmarks roll on.”

I choked at the mention of landmarks.  June 4th, December 31 and others are not yet holidays. By the some mercies, we have been spared the marking of these ignominious days as worthy of yearly celebrations.

 
I felt a relief.  The country needs a rest from holidays, I told myself. 

The relief was short lived when I recalled that February 24th, this ignominious day, was as yet to be put on the list for holidays.   Somebody, without a distaste, is bound to propose it one of these days.

My brainiac said there were 52 weeks in a regular year and seven days in the week. His theory was, out of the seven days five were supposed to be working days, but in reality only three do ever achieve that mark for labor.
 
And why, I should have already known.

Starting with Fridays, no real work would be done at our government and municipal offices. This day of the week would usually be loaded with anticipation and preparation for an event  or two during the weekend - the weddings, the funerals and other cultural and social activities.
 
Depending on the distance and the traffic pattern of the day, Fridays may be a good time to start your journey for the week-end celebration.

Human nature being what it is and sometimes creative, some would want to give themselves the extra advantage of early start of the journey to Thursday instead of Friday. thus collapsing their work schedule to three instead of the five productive days a sane society would expect from her citizens.

Thursdays become burdened with anticipation and preparation for weekend events, same as Fridays were before.
 
For those workers who have nowhere to go that weekend, there would be separate encumbrances.

They would be left with fewer hands to man the bureaucracies. Therefore, many will use the time plotting and dogging the work load left for them to tackle.

These will be the reaction to just the event that are known.  Complications arise when the made-up and opportunistic excuses arrive for happenings unknown, which given the religious, cultural and tribal nature of our society are bound to happen unscheduled.
 
All put together, the Church outings, the cultural rites and the festivals (Kpo Dziemo, Homowo, Aboatsire, Retreats) tend to drain productivity out of our work week. But who would want to be called obscurantist?

At this stage you begin to wonder the impact on our work culture, since only a tiny fraction of the population takes care of our government bureaucracies, therefore, any unscheduled gap in work schedule will have its own set of repercussions.

I saw a police man berating a superior for not allowing him to attend the funeral of his brother. His job at the security point at that moment came next to his ability to pay his final respect to his brother. His replacement had to be pulled off from somewhere else.

Then, of course, he would not be the only relative of the dead. There might be others, some with responsibilities that could fall within the same or larger bureaucracies, either in the police force, army or other governmental services.
 
Remember, our society is well knit too. Office members and friends in the same government services can end up being at the same funeral. A whole office room can, therefore, be emptied on a Friday by one funeral on the weekend.

A citizen, unless he or she is a cynic, has no reason to suspect what may be happening within a certain bureaucracy in terms of production until he or she shows up at that office. Say, at the Post Office to collect a certified package only to learn that the keeper of the safe left for a funeral with the keys in his pocket.

It might sound strange, but this was the experience I had once at the Cantonment Post Office, when I went there to collect an express package, The man in charge had taken off for a funeral that Friday and would not be back till Tuesday, the following week.

My inability to secure the important package that day was not as disappointing as the nonchalance that greeted me at the Post Office. But I was the odd man out for not understanding that it was necessary for the store room to be shut for safety and for the reason given!

I didn’t get my package that day. Not even on the Tuesday promised. The recovery of whatever the package contained had to be delayed, whether it was time sensitive, health critical or not!
 
Sorry to say that the absentee officer showed up on the following Wednesday, when I was able to retrieve my package.
 
I had another need once to clear a container at Tema on a day that fell on December 18th. I was not able to do so until the first week of the New Year.
 
Considering all these happenings surrounding our major holidays and celebrations I would dare state If there were a scale that could accurately gauge the national work output missing during these times the resulting weight would have to be phenomenal.

The key to all this is that we work less than we think we do in Ghana. We need to adjust our holiday mentality for development to happen. Let our next holiday appointments be made to celebrate WORK. Trade the next holiday to celebrate WORK AND HAPPINESS.

E. Ablorh-Odjidja,Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, July 1, 2009

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