I must confess one of my favourite all-time calypso tracks is ‘Ugly Woman’, the Mighty Bomber version, originally written and performed by Roaring Lion in 1933, the calypsonian whose music career spanned 65 years.

This hilarious song has Roaring Lion advising the world, “If you want to be happy, living a king’s life, never make a pretty woman your wife. All you got to do is just as I say. From a logical point of view, Always marry a woman uglier than you.” It is one of the best tracks ever composed and performed, I think. But, there is something about the song which may be lost on the listener as he or she enjoys it: it answers to a long-held prejudice that physically attractive women are sexually promiscuous and unfaithful. Well, certainly, it had no effect on me when it came to making a bridal choice. 

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On Friday, February 11, during a current affairs programme on Peace FM, a leading member of the ruling National Democratic Congress repeated the posthumous smear campaign that Joseph  Boakye Danquah, the ‘doyen of Ghana’ and co-founder of Ghana’s first political party, the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), was a CIA spy.

To support this false allegation, the NDC man stated categorically that declassified CIA files of Ghana’s First Republic name Dr Danquah, then the leader of the United Party (UP), the main opposition party to Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP), as a CIA spy.

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U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, gave a prophetic advice to Middle East leaders gathered in Qatar for the Forum of the Future on January 12 that their regimes should adapt or die. Reform or deform. A few days later, Ben Ali fell and, and scents from the Jasmine Revolution filling the air ofEgypt, with Hosni Mubarak, misreading the mood and sacking his government and promising to step down at a future date when the demand of the masses are simply: ‘go and go now!’.

What is happening in the two Arab nations has been compared to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovokia in 1989 and its domino effect in shredding to pieces the iron curtain, which led to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the subsequent dominance of multiparty democracy in bothEurope and Africa.

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