Monday 30 August 2010

how rotten it is to cheat at sports

HOW ROTTEN IT IS TO CHEAT AT SPORTS!

By CAMERON DUODU


Modern sport has become almost a religion to many people.

This is because politics is often crooked and dull. Education reaches a saturation point after which new information is not as welcome as when we were young. Sex ditto.

But sport is for ever exciting. When you are young, you go into it with gusto and try your best to excel in it. There is nothing like starting a race with eight other people and finishing ahead of all of them. Or starting a football match and scoring more goals than your opponents.

Even in later years, when you may not be physically capable of partaking in sport in any meaningful way, you can sit in your sofa in front of a television set and take part in sporting activities -- in your mind!

Sitting around and watching others do it can arouse as much passion in one as one used to experience when one was taking part in the events oneself. In a way, it is even better, for one can get a panoramic view of the whole event, whereas when one was participating, one’s view was limited to just one‘s own perspective of it.

Better still, when one is only taking part in one’s mind, one can be as creative as one likes and shout to indicate how good one would have been, had one been on the field.

“Shoot to the right!…Oh silly boy -- he shot to the left and sent it straight to an opponent. Look back! Look back! Oh --- he didn’t look back and he’s been felled. I told him to look back and he didn’t, and now he’s on the ground!”

Apart from football and athletics, one of the sports I enjoy most these days is cricket. It looks as if it is a lazy game -- long drawn out, with very little happening most of the time, and a lot of the same thing happening most of the time. The bowler bowls, the batsman tries to stop the ball from hitting his stumps; often the ball passes harmlessly by, and is harmlessly caught by the wicket-keeper. And the wicket-keeper gives the ball back to the bowler, who bowls again, past the batsman, to the wicketkeeper, and so it goes on and on and on.

If you do not understand the game, you will think that anyone who spends time watching it is potty, honest! But if you understand it, it is extremely breath-taking, for something unexpected --anything -- can happen at any moment. Instead of the ball bowled by the bowler sailing harmlessly past the batsman, it can whizz past his bat and hit one of the three stumps in front of which he stands.

There are two pieces of wood on top of the stumps and if these are dislodged when the ball hits the stumps, the batsman is OUT! He has been “bowled” and he goes away for another batsman to come and take his place.

Meanwhile, if the bowler has bowled six balls -- and all of them have been “good balls”, in that they have not been called by the umpire as being a “wide” or a “no-ball” -- then another bowler takes over and tries to do what the previous bowler was trying to do, namely, get the batsman “out”. In won’t go into “maidens” and “overs” at this time, but who knows, one day I shall get an opportunity to do so! Right now, I don’t want to satiate your poor mind.

Eleven players on each side play the game, and they are divided into batsmen and bowlers. All the bowlers have to bat as well, but not all the batsmen have to, or can, bowl. The aim of each side is to use its bowlers to get all the batsmen of the other side out.

Apart from being clean bowled, a batsman also goes out if a ball that has touched his bat is caught by any of the players of the opposing side, before it touches the ground. He is also out if the ball hits his leg and is thereby stopped from hitting the stumps. The umpire has to decide this

-- and it causes no end of controversy!

Now, all these things can happen after the ball has been bowled, and that is what makes cricket exciting. A catch can be made by one of the players scattered around the field (they are called fielders) or by the wicket-keeper, who stands right behind the batsman. Some of the catches are difficult because the ball travels very fast after the batsman has it hard. Some balls also go up very high and there is a special technique for catching them which, when executed perfectly, is very beautiful to watch.

So a lot of different skills are deployed in cricket, and many of these skills are not found in games like football or hockey, so it is the complexity of cricket which makes it specially appreciated by its followers.

Because of the peculiar skills required of its players, good cricketers are almost worshipped by their fans. If you have ever seen a guy called Viv Richards -- for example -- bat for the West Indies; or Brian Lara (also a batsman of the West Indies); Shane Warne (Australia) and Muttai Mutalitharan (Sri Lara) spin the ball whilst bowling; or Curtley Ambrose (West Indies) or Malcolm Marshall (West Indies) or Shoaib Akhtar (Pakistan) bowl the ball at about 100 mph and get excellent batsmen out -- the thrill is only slightly less than when you see Ussain Bolt leaving the field behind after only ten paces, in a 100-meter race.

So imagine the anger cricket fans have been feeling, on hearing that Mohammed Amir, a young Pakistani bowler, who took six wickets at Lord’s cricket ground in London last Friday in a match against England, cheated during the game. A newspaper called The News of The World managed to get a middleman to offer a huge sum of money, £150,000, to Amir to bowl four “no-balls” at certain stages during the match against England.

He did play the no-balls. The payback was that if anyone had betted that those no-balls would occur at those particular times during the match and they did, he could have made a fortune. And, apparently, such complex bets are made in East Asia frequently -- mostly underground -- during cricket matches.

Now, in the current case, the no-balls did not affect the match. Pakistan was losing and would have lost anyway, whether the no-balls were played or not. But the big question is: if a Pakistani player could be induced to take money to play a “no-ball”, what other things could he -- or indeed the whole team do -- to satisfy betters during a match? Could they ”throw” a whole match? Could good batsmen deliberately get themselves “out” whilst building up a good innings for their team? Could bowlers deliberately bowl wildly and allow the opposing batsmen to obtain a lot of runs?

The issue has dealt a very big blow indeed at international cricket. There have been other instances of corruption in cricket before, the most notable being the confession by the captain of South Africa, Hansie Cronje, in 2000, that he took a large sum of money from bookmakers in exchange for information about a match in which he was playing.

The International Cricket Council has been making efforts to stamp out corruption from the game since then, but apparently, it hasn’t yet succeeded.

I am enraged by this incident because it couldn’t have come at a worse moment for Pakistan. The country is fast disappearing under water, after a huge flood caused by the monsoon rains. All that could cheer Pakistanis up was the excellent performance of their cricket team against England. Now, that too has been snatched from them.

I am also annoyed at The News Of The World, for if it had not entrapped the young player, he would not have fallen victim to corruption. To have deliberately set out to ensnare a vulnerable young man whose mind would have been on his flooded home back in Pakistan, with huge wads of easy money, was particularly heartless of the paper. What he did cannot be excused, but there is always a giver before there is a taker.

The only positive thing that can come out of the sad episode is that the International Cricket Council will redouble its efforts to stamp out corruption from the game, so that we can full-heartedly believe that the results we see in matches are genuine results.

Tuesday 24 August 2010

REVISITING CONFLICT RESOLUTION


WE MUST REVISIT ASPECTS OF OUR TRADITIONAL CONFLICT RESOLUTION MECHANISMS


The Ghanaian Times Tuesday August 24, 2010

By Cameron Duodu

Disputes between the executive and the judiciary are nothing new. But they should be mediated within the confines of orderly, rational discourse, and not be allowed to descend into emotional name-calling, threats, or ignorant boasts meant to “show where power lies.”

When the Chairman of the NDC boasted that his party would deal with the judiciary, because a judge had given a judgement with which he disagreed, had he read the parts of the Constitution that relate to the appointment and removal of judges?

Does the NDC command the sort of majority in Parliament that could empower it to remove a judge?

When NDC followers poured abuse on their own Attorney-General, because she had lost a case, did they really understand what the Attorney-General’s position is, within the Government?

The Attorney-General presides over a department which assists her to advise the Cabinet on legal matters -- advice that might be accepted or rejected. That same department is charged with taking cases to court. When it does so, it always knows that it might win or lose. That is because the law is a matter of interpretation, and people can naturally interpret words -- which in reality, what laws are - differently.

In a court, it is assumed the interpretation is done without malice or bias, and lawyers, who can themselves become judges, must be extremely sure of that they’ve got watertight evidence, if they accuse judges of malice or bias.

Indeed, Mrs Betty Mould-Iddrisu is being accused by NDC members in precisely the same manner that Nana Akufo Addo was pilloried by NPP supporters, when he was Attorney-General. But when he was transferred to the Foreign Office, did the NPP stop losing cases? Even if the losses stopped, it was probably because lessons had been learnt about what to take to court, and how.

In my day, I have seen other Attorney-Generals suffer at the hands of their own supporters. Bashir Kwaw Swanzy, Kwame Nkrumah’s brilliant Cambridge-educated AG, was harried after he had lost the treason case against Tawia Adamafio and others in 1963.

So legislation was passed in Parliament, empowering the President to set aside a judgement of the superior court of judicature!

This was so unusual that C L R James, a school-mate of George Padmore’s and a fervent Nkrumah supporter, was scandalised and broke off relations with Nkrumah after Nkrumah had done it. Of course, Kwaw Swanzy’s name will always be associated with Dr Nkrumah’s dismissal of the highest judges of the land.

I also remember how Mr N Y B Adade, Attorney-General for the Progress Party Government, was vilified a great deal by his own side during the emotive litigations in 1970 over the Apollo 568 dismissals. He was largely blamed for Prime Minister Busia’s “No Court” speech, in which Busia claimed that “No court” could force his Government to employ people it did not want to employ in the public services.

A can of worms was opened by that case when, perhaps out of frustration, Mr Adade accused the Acting Chief Justice, Mr Justice Azu Crabbe, of showing bias on behalf of one of the litigants because Crabbe was somehow related to the litigant. Azu Crabbe, in turn, told me in an interview, as editor of the Daily Graphic that Mr Adade was also related to someone concerned in the case. My report of the interview did not hide my exasperation at the way lawyers sometimes behaved towards each other.

What all this shows is that it is pointless to set the judiciary against the executive because of court decisions. The Attorney-General’s department is composed of lawyers. The judiciary, too, is composed of lawyers. Why can’t they conduct cases in the manner lawyers agreed upon, among themselves, for generations? Didn’t they all study for and pass the same professional examinations?

The country at large has agreed to live under a system called the rule of law. The supreme law is the Constitution. And the Constitution delineates the powers and functions of both executive and the judiciary in quite a precise manner. No-one can change that delineation without a referendum.

And I don’t think the NDC, which came to power with a wafer-thin majority, is about to call a referendum to redefine the functions of the judiciary vis-à-vis the executive, is it?
So it is up to all of us, led by our lawyers (both on the bench and at the bar) to learn to live within the confines of our own Constitution.

When I see how emotional people get over court cases, I have to restrain myself from laughing. For we have deliberately thrown out all our own traditional conflict resolution processes, and adopted, instead, both the party-political system of government, which is adversarial, and a judicial system, which is also adversarial.

In an adversarial system, someone always wins and someone else always loses. You go to court hoping your opponent will lose. And if he does lose, you are happy. But if, on the contrary, you happen to be the loser, then you get mad. Is that a fair, or sensible state of affairs?

Maybe to stop being so frustrated, we should revisit some the principles that underlay our traditional system of justice. I don’t mean the system -- which has gone beyond its sell-by date -- but the ideas that lay behind the system.

I remember that in our town, when the Queen Mother sat down to settle cases brought before her, she would be surrounded by all the elders of the town. Each elder represented a street in the town, so no-one could come to court without having someone amongst the elders who had his or her interests at heart.

The complainant would then be called to state his or her case. This was done by the complainant in person -- not through an impersonal presentation by someone else, that is, a lawyer. So the elders could watch the person‘s demeanour all the time.
If he or she stumbled over an aspect of the case, the elders made a mental note of it. If he or she got emotional or even broke down, in the course of the presentation, they would comfort him or her with soothing words, usually a proverb full of meaning.

They would then ask the complainant whether he or she had any witnesses to support hid/her case. And they would ask the witness questions. Most of the questions would be meant to tease out the real truth and expose any untruths contained in the well-rehearsed presentation earlier placed before them by the complainant.

Then, they would go through the whole process again with the person complained against. They would then retire to a secluded place in the palace to “consult the old woman”. This was a mythical old woman who had lived so long that she could not be shown top the public, and who knew everything that there was to know about life. No member of the public ever got to know what was sad during the consultation.

After they had consulted to their fill and reached agreement, they would come back with a verdict. This was usually so sagacious that it was almost always accepted by both parties. The parties would accept it because the experience of standing before elders they respected, and being allowed to tell everything like it was, would have had a therapeutic effect on them and relieved much of the pain that made go to court in the first place.

Interestingly, the party found “guilty” was not punished, as such, but asked to pay something to “conciliate” the person wronged. This “conciliation”, known as mpata, was not the same as a “compensation” or a “fine”. It was much more subtle than that -- it was meant to address the litigants’ emotional needs by actually making them feel reconciled one to the other. Sometimes, after the mpata had been accepted, the litigants would be made to embrace each other, to cheering by members of the public.

Indeed, when the mpata was proposed, whoever was to receive it (the mpata) was deliberately asked whether he or she would accept it. Once it was accepted, the two people were meant to live together, henceforth, in harmony in the same village.

The litigant could refuse the mpata and appeal to the Chief of the town. But that would almost always be a pointless effort, inasmuch as the Queen Mother and her most important elders would also sit in with the Chief, and unless a really strong new case was presented, the same verdict would prevail as in the Queen Mother’s court.

The emphasis on conciliation was purposely meant to ensure that should there be an emergency in the town -- such as a war -- the level of co-operation expected from the populace to enable them to ward off the external danger, would not be jeopardised by the ill-feeling between members of the group about to be attacked. Our history is full of mighty states weakened by unsettled disputes: the Ashanti empire weakened considerably after the Dwaben people had deserted it and founded New Juaben (Koforidua) further south. A dispute with Bekwai also weakened the Ashanti campaign against the British during the Yaa Asantewaa war. So if you do not know history, you might think that there are too many “disputes” amongst us that waste a lot of time. The objective is to ensure that true harmony exists amongst our people. Of course, that desire for harmony can be abused by a selfish
Desire to grab other people’s property or steal stools from their true owners.

Of course, magistrates’ courts and superior courts of judicature were brought in by the British, either to totally negate our traditional system, or to lessen their importance. So now we have this adversarial system of “you win, I lose; you lose, I win.”

Almost no attempt is made at reconciliation under our current system, although mediation processes are possible within it. Anyway, by the time a loser has paid the winner’s “costs”, in addition ton his/her own counsel’s fees, his or her anger would have doubly heightened and reconciliation would be virtually impossible.

So we now live in a continually adversarial mode: we fight each other at elections; we fight each other over legislation in Parliament; and we fight each other over legal and constitutional issues in the courts.

Can our frail society, in which so many people go to bed hungry every day; sick people are unable to receive adequate medical treatment; people whose homes are destroyed by floods receive very little assistance; while stupid “people of influence” do not scruple to flaunt their conspicuous wealth before all and sundry, endure so much adversarial squabbling and survive?

I remember the shock with which I saw the pictures of Elizabeth Ohene’s brother, who had been brutally assaulted at a polling station in the Volta Region, during the election in 2008. And only last Sunday, a young friend of mine recalled the fear that engulfed him in Accra, as he ran away from his office, in the last hours before the 2008 election result was declared, on hearing that office after office after office was closing for the day? This was after some irresponsible FM stations had carried some false reports that incited people to converge on the Electoral Commission offices, armed with cutlasses and cudgels.

We are definitely sitting on a time-bomb, with the fuse in the hands of FM stations, some of which are only interested in engendering controversy, so that advertisers would consider them as popular stations whose services would yield dividends if utilised. If we don’t find ingenious ways to defuse the situation and continue to prime the time-bomb with unnecessary rantings about legal matters which only few of us really understand, it will explode beneath us.

The Kenyans sat down unaware of where their society was at, until their time-bomb exploded, even though they knew of what had happened in Rwanda. In both countries, loud-mouthed semi-literates were left unchecked to stoke the fires of national doom.

In Ghana, our history is full of useful lessons. Let us then revisit that history -- to learn useful lessons from it. Otherwise we shall condemn ourselves to relive the worst parts of that history.