By the grace of God, I have attained age 88. The question on my mind is: Can Ghana do the same?

I was born on May 24, 1937. So I am 88 years old. My beloved family and my ever so affec­tionate friends, are all warmly celebrating this biological milestone with me.

But I am uneasy. You see, when I was little, I was always anticipating things. For instance, when I was told, at age 7, that I would be going to school the following year (that’s at age 8) I began preparing for the event with imagination.

First, I persuaded my par­ents to buy a slate for me. I then went to a Zambrama store-keeper’s stall and bought half of a broken piece of chalk. Cost? One penny. (For those too young to know the “times table” a penny was where mon­ey began to have real impor­tance. Twelve pennies made one shilling. And 20 shillings made one pound. Now, that’s where real “wealth” began!)

I didn’t wait to enter school before I learnt how to write. I persuaded my elder half-broth­er Kwasi Kwakye, to teach me ABCD at both capital and small letter level, and I was so enchanted with what my little fingers could produce on the slate that I acquired the skill of going into the bush to find a special fruit

whose juice could polish the slate surface into a shiny black, making

whatever one wrote on the slate with a white chalk stand out beautifully. I do

have a natural ugly scrawl, but that technique enabled me to camouflage it, and my Class One teacher was so impressed with my ability to write legibly – and do other “precocious” things – that he made me the class prefect.

Because of my ability to look ahead and learn things before I was formally taught them, I was jumped from Class One to Class Three at the end of my first year in school. The rest is, as they say, history.

Having risen to the top of a career in journalism, I would now, at my advanced age, have loved to retire from writing about current happenings and devote myself to my mem­oirs. But the intuition that has served me so well during my career, forbids me from turning a blind eye to what is currently happening in Ghana.

I am quite convinced that if we continue destroying our rivers, lakes and other wa­ter-bodies at the rate we are going, whilst at the same time, doing the dirty work of climate change for it by denuding our human habitation of the rich forests that we were blessed by Nature to inherit, Ghana may not last another two decades and attain, as a Nation, the age of 88 that I am celebrating for myself.

I am not a “Cassandra”, and so I won’t burden you with a lengthy recapitulation of the reasons why our Nation should heed my warning, in order not to PERISH. The SAHARA DESERT is there for everyone to see.

Besides, I have said every­thing that I have to say about galamsey.

Just Google: cameron duodu+galamsey.

Thanks for lending me your ears.

BY CAMERON DUODU