Ghanaian rain the least of the pain for Vodafone’s African adventure

“It’s raining!” shouts Magnus as he flings himself onto my bed at 5am while looking for things to do following the household ban on TV.

He opens the curtains and I open an eye. Rain of tropical proportions.

“Thank you London!” he says, and skips off.

I’m not sure why he’s so pleased. But I am delighted, because today caretaker Jonas can divert the gallons he soaks onto sun-baked earth to our reserve tank instead, so when water looters steal from the mains so they can survive, so can we.

Then I remember Vodafone.

The downpour that’s keeping us in rainforest garden is drowning cables elsewhere in town. There’s no way our broadband will be working.

I call the Vodafone man. “There are major problems,” he says. I ask if it’s the rain, he says no, of course not, then relents when pushed and says the problems could last the day. I hang up and wonder if the call will be used for quality and training purposes.

I switch to the MTN line and watch it whip through credits at unimaginable speed.

Vodafone must be finding it tricky in Ghana. The rain is one problem, but small in comparison to this: a report emerged last week calling its acquisition last year of Ghana Telecom, the state provider, “unconstitutional” and “illegal” and calling for the entire deal to be renegotiated.

It’s a slap in the face to a world class network that has entered a lucrative market with an extravagant promo promising a $1m grand prize which includes a luxury villa in Accra’s exclusive Trasacco Valley, a chauffeur-driven 4X4, motorbikes and scholarships in a draw that will be aired on national TV. Its presence here is inescapable.

On paper, Vodafone bought a 70% stake in Ghana Telecom for $900m in a deal that completed in August 2008.

But the report, commissioned by the incoming National Democratic Congress government led by John Atta Mills, said that "through a complicated series of financial arrangements" the actual price it paid was less than $450m - far less than the annual earnings potential of Ghana Telecom. Analysts say the figure in reality could be as low as $267m.

I call Vodafone HQ to ask about revenues from Ghana. They don’t break them out. So I ask my neighbours how much they spend on their mobile telephones. They estimate $120 a year. Add to that some broadband customers ($500 a year), some mobile broadband (costlier), heavy use by companies and NGOs, and the fact that the Ghana Telecom deal added 1.6 million customers to the Vodafone network, and the revenues start to stack up. It doesn’t take long to make the deal pay for itself.

In all of this it would be unfair not to mention what Vodafone brings to Ghana. It's made the country a key cog in its corporate and social responsibility programme, stepped up health and safety, changed electrical equipment to cut fire risk, and taught safer standards of driving. A spokesman in the UK tells me the company has yet to receive a copy of the report, and that it will decide how to react when the Ghanaian government makes an official statement.

The report, which is certainly available in Ghana, goes on to question why Vodafone's bid was approved when other firms, such as Telkom South Africa were offering higher bids for a lesser stake.

It adds that “although strong allegations were made about bribery and corruption, the committee did not have the powers and resources to investigate these claims”.

Ah! Right on cue, a chance for Atta Mills to act, to right possible wrongs of the former (opposition) government and come up smelling of roses.

Right? Wrong.

Contacted when the report emerged, communications minister Haruna Iddrisu told Ghana’s Joy FM radio station that the ""Government is of the opinion that the Committee overstepped its remit in expressing an opinion on the constitutionality or otherwise of the transaction."

So why such reluctance to act?

The report into Vodafone’s purchase of Ghana Telecom comes at a time when the NDC government is squirming from the fallout of the Mabey and Johnson bribery case. Mabey and Johnson is a British company that specialises in building bridges and it recently was found guilty of trying to bribe officials in a number of countries to secure contracts.

One of those countries was Ghana when the NDC was last in power in the 1990s. Two ministers serving in the current NDC administration have resigned pending an investigation into their alleged role in the bribe-taking scandal. So flinging mud too enthusiastically at the former New Patriotic Party government for its handling of the Ghana Telecom sale risks some of the mud coming back.

And it risks the country's own attractiveness as a place to do business.

Ghana has done well in recent years to market itself as the good news story of Africa.

Compared with its neighbours – Cote D’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Liberia, that’s not particularly hard, and while Nigeria remains a smog-choked punishment of a place to do business, Ghana is a safe and stable Anglophone alternative just three countries to the left.

Amid the billions set to flow in thanks to oil exploration that’s revealed one of the richest African prospects in years, is $500m or so lost on a telco deal really worth the quibble?

Africa, Accra, Asbestos...Trafigura

My husband calls just minutes after the Trafigura news reaches me from a colleague in London. "There is asbestos outside the school," he says. "I've spoken to them, they're having it disposed of. Can you check, later?"

Of course I agree. "It" is corrugated roofing material, white, old and toxic. I went to look. It is under a tree in the sun, flaking and broken and in the path of an easterly wind that blows towards our house.

"Having it disposed of" assumes there might be some municipal authority that will come in suits and masks to take it away. But asbestos worry hasn't reached these parts. I can make this statement with a small degree of authority because of a conversation with caretaker Jonas about the ironing board earlier this week.

"I can do the ironing" says Jonas, a muscular Ghanaian. "You can't", says my husband, a muscular Brit, "it has an asbestos hotplate". As much as I enjoy this homoerotic housewife chat, there is an important subtext. Jonas is a clever man but he has no idea about asbestosis. And nor do I, much, but that's because I've never had to deal with a potential cause. The locals don't because no one has told them, and they waft past the roofing in long skirts, sweeping up fibres into the sultry haze and moving about their business.

I check with the school later about the disposal. "It's all in hand" says the secretary, who dismisses me but shows no plans to follow it up. We walk home on the opposite side of the road, Magnus breathing through cupped hands.

An expert on the Trafigura tale says the level of toxic waste dumped in neighbouring Ivory Coast was enough to "bring a major city to its feet". A major city might have warned its people not to go outside and breathe the fumes that caused miscarriages and deaths, to work from home, to stop the transport system. I don't think that happened in Abidjan.

Do Africans care about rubbish dumps? I don't know. I queried Google. It said "Did you mean: do Americans care about rubbish dumps?"

On a day when Trafigura is top news, I didn't expect that. There's not much more I can say.

After one week, this much I know...

Writing a blog about a subject as emotive as Africa is hard. At some point I shall write about turmoil or the lack thereof, music and dancing and joie de vivre, but I am underqualified to do it yet. I've been cosseted in a luxury hotel with wifi and three pools and now a beautiful house with a caretaker, aircon and the world's biggest bed (photo to come). I haven't been to Sodom and Gommorrah, the slums housing 55,000, which the authorities plan to destroy. I haven't seen the local effects of HIV or the sadness of poverty I haven't been to the part of the beach the locals use as a toilet, nor inside single rooms housing neighbours' entire families. When I do, I'll have a rounder picture.

Other visitors warn me not to go near the scruffy town beach, but I do. They say the hawkers make it unpleasant. I have found it to be anything but. They exist, but you can exhaust their persistance in seconds by talking of English football. I take Magnus (aged 6) for back-up. I know all of the clubs but none of the players. So Magnus, a gentleman, takes over converstion while I look at the sea and examine opportunities for fishing.

I am lost when local children who play in the garden (like Jacob, pictured) ask to come inside the house. Our (British) landlady says the tempation to steal is too great. We have reporting equipment here that could provide three years' wages a pop. We have bought a rope swing and paddling pool in the hope it will not be an issue, but I know in time they will come inside and watch TV, and I won't want to give them back.

The beautiful photographs that are an inevitable consequence of this stunning colourful land will be impossible to post to this blog as an inevitable consequence of the stunningly poor upload speeds. To maintain my marriage to the web, I have bought both a Vodafone broadband connection and mobile broadband from South Africa's MTN. I am single handedly propping up their share prices. The Vodafone service is unreliable, affected by something as basic as rain. My Blackberry is an expensive luxury I turn on only on work days.

The taxis are universally ancient, the doors falling off, suspension gone. When a driver left his seat to help me with bags, his car rolled off and he caught it through the window. Asking for seatbelts seems absurd, but we do it. The views are incredible.

I am scared to go fishing. It was one of the things I looked forward to most, but visiting the tackle section of the supermarket has dampened enthusiasm. Rod fishing hooks at home measure a couple of inches. None here measures fewer than 10. I can only imagine what they can catch.

Lifeguards are unqualified. Some parents even more so. At a local hotel, as staff packed up at 5pm, they found the body of a child at the bottom of the pool. It took them three hours to find the parents. I am taking my boy to the pool for eight solid hours at weekends to make him a stronger swimmer. I have taken him out too deep and watched him cry for help and never want to go there again.

Nights that start at 6 when the sun goes quickly still feel like winter. Even in the tropics with the aircon off. But you sleep soundly knowing the sun will stream through the shutters in the morning, and that the cockerel will bang on for six hours solid.