There is only one topic in town this week, and it will be with extreme luck that anything apart from football gets a word in, especially in the media, over the next three weeks. The hope is that the whole thing will culminate in a big winners’ parade in every Ghanaian city, town or village when the Black Stars lift that trophy on February 20th. We have waited a long time for our record-equalling fifth time. The build-up to the tournament has revealed Ghana as a country of incorrigible “last-minuters” who will always be putting the last dash of paint on as the guests arrive. We are like that. Two weeks ago, the road to the main games hostel in Tamale was not tarred, the furnishing at the new Golden Tulip Hotel was not all in place; some training pitches were not even properly designated as such. But we have had two years to prepare, and we have done so on the principle that it will be alright on the night! Tomorrow is “the night” when the waiting will finally be over. This tournament is bigger than football, from the hype it has received ever since Dr. Kofi Amoah and his friends conceived the idea of Ghana playing host to Africa again. It all looks like a century ago, but it was only two years ago that the performance of the Black Stars at the World Cup in Germany left us no choice but to bid for something big in football. At the time, some of us felt that we ought to be hosting the World Cup. The period between winning the bid to host the championship and the staging has not been Ghana’s finest in terms of talking up our own games. For some reason too deep to fathom, the fever that was anticipated failed to catch and even now with just a day to go, the fervour looks rather forced and synthetic. Maybe when we beat Guinea tomorrow the flags will fly with a bit more oomph and conviction. There is a big lesson there: South Africa still has two years to go before the World Cup arrives in that country and yet its slick advertising campaign is almost kicking into high gear. There is no escaping the fact that the World is Coming to Africa in 2010, and that South Africa is enjoying the most important sporting event in the country’s history. And this is a country that hosted the Rugby World Cup, which to some countries in the southern hemisphere is bigger than the soccer version. Why has it taken Ghana so long for the Nations’ Cup fever to heat the skins of our people? I have my stock answer, which applies to all Ghanaian situations irrespective of content or context. Lack of proper planning and joined up thinking. Don’t get me wrong; I am not unmindful of the amount of work the LOC and allied associates have put into this but there are lessons to learn and it is better to trot them out now instead of later. As we all know, Ghana will win the cup, and that ironically is my fear. When we win the cup, we will be too excited to bring out the lessons that we have to learn and we will be bound to repeat them, as we always do. I think that the first and enduring planning challenge was the estimate of the resources that the LOC felt it could raise. It is obvious that the patriotic citizens who took upon themselves this task oversold the potentials of the games. According to a credible source, the initial plans drawn up by the LOC showed only a minimum of government support. That meant that a new round of negotiations, paperwork and inevitable delays occurred every time a deadline or appraisal was missed. And inevitably the taxpayer had to go to the rescue. In one sense this scenario has worked well because there is no doubt that the government would have baulked at the idea of carrying the proportion of the financial responsibility it eventually has assumed. All is well that ends well, you may say, but near subterfuge, albeit unintentional cannot be a substitute for policy. It is better to draw realistic plans so that responsibilities are assumed right from the beginning instead of the ad hoc situation that it becomes. In the end, however, we are four spanking stadiums richer with other bits of infrastructure in place. We can now end the national disgrace of sending our athletes to Togo for national trials. The other thing that boggles me is how much we have adopted the tournament as a peg on which to hang every aspiration however mundane. For example, one has read of many injunctions such as the need to clean our surroundings because of CAN 2008, or that Accra taxi and tro-tro drivers must not smell during CAN 2008. The indefatigable Mayor of Accra, Hon. Mr. Adjiri Blankson has tried to kit out the taxi drivers in uniform, also for CAN 2008 but we will know whether he has been successful on the smell front only after Ghana scores the first goal and tro-tro drivers remove their shirts in celebration. Obviously, this does not apply to all tro-tro drivers. According to my friend Mr. Asamoah Boateng “Asabee”, Minister of Tourism and Diasporan Relations, we are expecting one million visitors, although I believe this to be either widely exaggerated or the result of faulty arithmetic. The last I heard of it, there are less than five hundred Zambians and ditto for Namibia, Sudan, etc. Given these small numbers I wonder if Nigeria and Ivory Coast alone can make up the deficit. It would be good to have Asabee’s one million people but it would be a huge challenge to accommodate them, feed them, transport them and keep them all secure during their stay in our country. A friend sent me an interesting text message saying that the biggest threat to the safety of visitors to CAN 2008 is the zebra crossing. I thought about it for just a second and saw his point. In many countries people respect zebra crossings and visitors to Ghana may think we do the same here. This means that foreign pedestrians will be stepping into the path of oncoming vehicles driven by people who think that the zebra crossing is an order to step on the accelerator. Can’t we also light up our streets for CAN 2008, since we appear to be doing everything else that we have been denied for our visitors? Since we are cleaning our streets, smiling more broadly, smelling sweeter for CAN 2008, we can do no worse than instruct Ghana’s drivers in the art of braking at zebra crossings. The point surely is this: we all expect the legacy of Ghana CAN 2008 to go beyond the football, which is why we are happy to have the related infrastructure, tourism and the like. However, I fear what will happen after the CAN when we all revert to our bad behaviour. We can avert this possibility by making good behaviour one of the legacies of the tournament. It is not as farcical as you think. The Chinese are training their people to smile better during this year’s Olympics in Beijing. Once they learn how to smile it will be difficult for them to revert to their old frowning ways. You get the idea. • As I was finishing this article, it occurred to me that the one issue that could knock off the media dominance of Ghana CAN 2008 is the Francis Poku sacking conundrum. The government needs to explain what is going to the nation. To sack a National Security Minister abruptly is strange enough, to do so without any explanation appears perverse, especially done by a government that prides itself as a champion of democracy and good governance. Good luck to the Black Stars. To the rest of you, go out and buy our book, Pride and Glory – The Story of the Black Stars in Germany ’06. It was written for a time like this. E-mail: gapenteng@hotmail.com Source: Kwasi Gyan-Apenteng: Journalist & Media Consultant Please copy all correspondence to gapenteng2003@yahoo.co.uk