I live in one of the plush residential enclaves here in Accra, East Legon. There’s everything here. It’s a lot of fun walking down Dakar Avenue from that elegant two-storey mansion on the left, a few blocks away from my one-bedroom apartment. It takes about fifteen minutes to stroll from Media Pharmacy to the four-star MJ Grand Hotel for a drink. In fact whenever the lights are out the poolside of this hotel along the Abotsiman Street becomes a second home. Sights of the manors of football star Anthony Yeboah and businessman Osei Kwame Despite often make the journey to this hideout feel like a tour of Europe. But the Anthony Yeboahs and the Despites are not the only ones here. East Legon is where many of Ghana’s politicians live. Former Attorney General Betty-Mould Iddrisu lives here or has a home here? Konadu Apraku has a plush mansion here. My good friend and former Information Minister Stephen Asamoah Boateng also owns a house here. There are many others here. But why would they not own homes here? The answer is simple; East Legon is a perfect piece of paradise. This reality, however, contrasts sharply with conditions at Oshiuman, a small village in the Ga West municipality where a few months ago, residents shared their only source of water with cattle. Bare-chested children plunged into the Nsakina River and when they emerged rivulets of dirty water ran down their faces. This is water they fetched for drinking – a brownish sludge of water, animal excreta and waste from human activities. In my documentary about Oshiuman I also visited the Buruli Ulcer clinic at the Amasaman Hospital where I nearly somersaulted at the sight of red open wounds that spewed a disgusting mixture of blood and white fluid. The facility was already over-stretched but the hospital tried to keep the suffering patients. Hardworking doctors coxed patients as though the sick were their lovers. Patients in this unit would spend up to two years within its walls because it takes time to treat this infection – and this means a lot of financial burden on their families. Sadly, some patients do not even survive. Fati, a 39-year-old single mother at Oshiuman told me about how her 11-year-old son died of the disease; she did not have money to send him to hospital so he died. With these pictures still fresh on my mind, I get sad to hear about a so-called NYEP Mafia – a bunch of top officials at the National Youth Employment Programme, now GYEEDA, who channeled the tax-payer’s money into their own pockets. This powerful, crafty syndicate, as my colleague Manasseh Azure found out, opened accounts in rural banks where these monies were stashed and later shared. District coordinators “coordinated” well with people at the national office to dupe you and me. You see, if such pilfering of public funds continues people in Oshiuman will continue to depend on the same polluted stream and contract Buruli Ulcer and eventually die. It’s amazing how wide the gap between the rich and the poor seems to be in Ghana – some people are filthy rich while others literally live from hand to mouth and struggle to clothe themselves. Interestingly, the Oshiuman experience is common in many communities across the country. Imagine a village where potable water is a rare and precious liquid – women and children walk miles to a stream to fetch water. In Abokobi children would not go to school because they’d have been too tired to do so after trekking for miles in search of water. This reminds me of my experience as a little boy at Fete Agya, a small village near Mim in the Brong Ahafo Region. Fete Agya had a few streams from which you could fetch some water for drinking. But my father, a perfectionist who would not want to gulp down any germs, insisted we walked to town to fetch tap water. This is something I did most of my childhood in that small village until work brought my dad to Accra. How about places where there’s no tap water? People who live in such communities resort to contaminated sources of water and they suffer various ailments. This translates into huge costs for government. There are no figures on how much this NYEP Mafia has “blown” but from the investigations it’s obvious millions of the taxpayer’s money have been stolen, prompting a cleanup of the payroll. Today, modules have been suspended and payments to beneficiaries frozen. Good news but I only pray these succeed in wiping out the ghost names because this is not the first time such an measure is being taken. Monies spent could provide small boreholes for thousands of communities around the country. For now though, it appears people in such deprived communities will continue dying from avoidable diseases and infections while many others are taken ill because the looting of public funds is still going on at many places.