A real hunk of a giant slips on a fairy's pair of shoes as easily as you please, and they fit ever so perfectly! It is one of the emerging mysteries of fast changing international relations and diplomacy between the big powers and the small nations of this troubled planet. Those to the far Left of global contemporary politics are agitated over this development, but the Right is as pleased as Punch ever was. That is how come the United States was geo-physically transplanted whole onto our soil this week, complete with President George Bush, the US naval fleet, infantry, Air Force, FBI and "The Company" responsible for you-know-what. If that is a lie, this other one is most definitely not: Mr Bush is resolute in his commitment to helping us do battle with the pestilent HIV contagion and the menace of malaria. Now, we must take the village health inspector at his word, Jomo. Where there are no mosquitoes, there can never be malaria. That means Mr Bush has some choices to make in terms of battle plan priorities. He could try helping Africa to wipe out mosquitoes from the continent in one swell swoop. Now, that would require the massive application of toxic chemicals with the potential to wipe out human and other natural life along with the mosquitoes, see? Alternatively, a spick and span environment will launch the infernal, winged creatures into eternal flight from Africa, but someone would have to banish poverty from our continent for that to happen. It would take a ten-time reincarnated President Bush several millenniums, to be able to come anywhere near doing that. We could get out of the dilemma by posing a simple question: Would the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry of the US not have found a vaccine for malaria long ago, if the disease were not a tropical one, but one afflicting the US and wiping out hundreds of thousands of Americans everyday? I have a strong belief that a vaccine can be found, but the cost of the necessary pharmaceutical research would be prohibitively colossal. No government or pharmaceutical company in the US or any malaria-free country in the West, would invest that kind of money in a malaria vaccine research. The vaccine would be expensive and poor African countries would not be able to afford it. For the pharmaceutical giants of the west, that would be like throwing the money into a vast blast furnace. There is the rub. Since the long awaited vaccine remains elusive, and transforming the squalid mosquito breeding environments in which hundreds of millions of African live is not practicable in this century, you wonder how Mr Bush proposes to achieve a reduction of malaria-related deaths across 15 African countries by half in coming years, as he has announced. President Bush conceded at a news conference on Wednesday morning, that some of the strategies being employed in HIV and malaria control, may not work, and that where this happened, other strategies would be employed. Why not narrow down the chances of failure by using scientific methods of identifying those strategies with the best chances of success, and concentrating available resources on them? We forgot to ask Mr Bush. Anyhow, Mr and Mrs Bush flew out of KIA yesterday morning, leaving us to resume what we do best: Talking and talking and talking and spreading political intrigue and acrimony all over the place, via radio, the press and the Internet. Poor Francis Akoto. What will he do now? This unsung Ghanaian postmaster of the web has become an unwitting Dr Frankenstein in cyber. Frankenstein in cyber space. The man created Ghanaweb to disseminate information and promote freedom of thought and expression among his countrymen at home and in the Diaspora. The paradoxical monster helps to promote these democratic ideals among Ghanaian Internet users one moment, and then threatens, to eat up Mr Akoto and the unity of his country the next. A lot of the political campaign-related discourse on Ghanaweb's discussion forum is a swirling hotchpotch of intellectual graffiti, pornographic explosion of psychotic emotions and mischievous debasement of decency and logic. The choicest words and phrases when it comes to curses and insults in any language, will be found not in an exclusive pub for street gangsters or unschooled sailors, but on the rowdy forum. Sometimes the monster even steals Akoto's identity and impersonates him as the author of libellous postings! It should be an interesting exercise trying to gauge the likely impact of the fierce war supporters of Professor E. A. Mills and Nana Akufo-Addo are waging on Ghanaweb, on the choices of floating voters who do not use the Internet. Out of our national population of some 20 million people, there were about 300,000 Internet users in 2004. The number must have grown significantly. In a country where unverified information spreads like harmattan-driven bushfires through rumour mongering and gossip, what Ghanaweb visitors are picking up on the site about the NDC and NPP presidential candidates is probably reaching more than a million floating voters who do not use the Internet. It appears we are heading for a crisis of the utilities, Jomo. Now that the Ghana 2008 tournament is over, cuts in electricity supply have returned with a vengeance. The problem with water supply appears to be even worse. Unlike the case of electricity supply, the water supply network is not designed in such a way as to facilitate rationing of the precious fluid of life, in times of shortage. So the Water Company has only managed to devise a rationing system of sorts, with rather interesting technical limitations. The location of some communities in the network makes it impossible to cut them off for even a day without shutting down the supply system altogether. The result? Some communities in the capital have water supply for between one and seven days a week or not at all, depending on their location. Our problems seem to know no end, Jomo. No sooner have we dealt with this challenge or thought we had, than another even more debilitating one begins peeping at us from across the horizon. Never mind, Jomo. We can always wax philosophical in self consolation, by simply declaring at each difficult turn, that things could have been worse! Source: Sydney Abugri/Daily Graphic Email:georgeabu@hotmail.com Website: www.sydneyabugri.com