The Culture Of Ghana Maybe Time

About a week ago, I arranged with a commercial mini bus driver (trotro) to pick me up at 37 Military Hospital Bus Stop to Ningo, a suburb of Accra. We agreed to meet at the bus stop at 2pm because we were supposed to be in Ningo at 3pm to pick up some spinners whom I have paid to perform at a funeral in Ningo.

I explained to the driver that we needed to be on time because if we got to Ningo later than 3pm, the spinners would charge me more money for the extra time they played. The driver assured me that he was more time conscious than I was so as we say in Ghana 'no problem'.

I packed my car at my mechanic's workshop, took a taxi (dropping) and got to our meeting point at exactly 1.47pm (13 minutes ahead of time). I called the driver on phone and told him I had arrived. He assured me that he would be on time.

After about 30mins (2.17pm), i.e. 17 minutes after our supposed meeting time, he called me and said he just took off from his mechanic?s workshop in Madina and was sure to get to me in 15 minutes. At this point I was up set for the simple fact that he was late.

I almost decided to hire another mini van but I considered the hustle and opted to wait for him. He finally arrived at exactly 3.29pm, i.e. 29minutes after the time we were supposed to have been in Ningo.

When he arrived his attitude was a mixture of apology, excuses and as if to say 1 hour 30 minutes lateness was not enough for me to be up-set. Later on when we got to Ningo and our lateness became a topic for discussion, the driver retorted with a pout 'Oh! But one hour 30 minutes lateness is nothing!??

Obviously he was not sorry for his 1 hour 30 minutes lateness and that worried and still worries me. Indeed it assaulted my intellect so much that I had to give the driver a whole lecture on time management and what the lack of it is doing to our individual, family, community and national lives.

Indeed, this same driver had earlier on narrated his experience with a white man in the past to me - how he used to work for the white man but was fired because of his chronic lateness to work. Obviously he did not learn any lesson from that experience, which was supposed to have been his best teacher.

He reminded me of the Ghanaian style poor time management, where two Ghanaians make an appointment to meet at a particular time, and yet in both of their minds the meeting time is always at least 2 hours later than the time they actually agreed to meet. Isn't that amazing? They call it the Ghana Maybe Time (GMT), a corruption of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)

Like the driver, to many Ghanaians, great and small, religious and atheist, leaders and followers, parents and children, teachers and students, government functionaries and civil servants and even some corporate leaders and their staff, one hour 30 minutes wasted is no big deal.

You would often hear the typical Ghanaian making a meeting appointment saying something like, "let's meet between 2 - 2.30pm, 3 - 3.30pm that way!" That is a very wide, ambiguous and confusing time range for any serious person to plan with. But that is how Ghanaians do it. No wonder our attitude toward time, right from our infancy is so that bad.

The discussion about poor time management on our side of the world has taken all kinds of forms and shapes but still that culture of good time management is far from being realized in our country and on our continent.

As undeveloped and underdeveloped as we are, one would have thought that time is one commodity that we don't have enough to waste. We can probably afford to waste all other resources like our natural endowments (the sun, minerals and what-have-you) because we have them in abundance and we have been wasting them already, anyway. But time is the most perishable commodity in this world and we don?t have enough of it to waste the way we do, especially because we have some catching up to do with the developed world.

There is an advert on CNN about Dow Jones Stock Exchange (if I am right), which says "people are making and losing millions of dollars around the clock." I reckon that for such people, one hour 30 minute is worth far, far more than nothing like the driver said.

Indeed I know of a Ghanaian Christian Minister who is also a Development Chief in one of the Ghanaian communities and a consultant to many heads of states across the globe, especially in South America and in Africa.

I had a privilege of chatting with him whiles on a visit to the US, where he resides and pastors one of the biggest international churches in the real sense of the word. He told me himself that for every hour of consultation with leading figures in the world, he is paid between $25,000 and $50,000. That is how much his one hour is worth. For sure that is more than nothing.

And that is just consultancy fee, we have not even added what he is paid when he gives a talk, hold seminars and workshops, how much he is making from the sales of his books, tapes and other materials by the hour and how much he is paid as monthly salary from his very thriving international church.

I know for a fact that over the past few years, this man I am talking about has injected over US$150 million dollars into Ghana and some other African countries in the form of development projects, social facilities, scholarship schemes and more.

Let me bring you home to myself ? besides my day job, which does not pay much, I inject some of my other talents into my one hour and it makes me far more than nothing. For instance one hour of engagement to perform at a function could earn me between 5million cedis to 10 million cedis, depending on how I negotiate, but not less.

Time management and the judicious use of time are very crucial to our personal, family, community and national development. But we seem not to realize that, as if we have been cursed to waste time and pride ourselves with time wasting attitudes and avoidable excuses.

I don?t want to go into the usual time wasting attitudes and activities at the workplace, like the newspaper and lotto paper syndrome, time consuming cultural practices like funerals and others, which we always talk about and yet no positive results. I want to look at the issue in another light.

First of all from the perspective of the individual - history has proven the fact that every lasting change begins with one or a few radical and determined individuals. It is important that as individuals we begin to see ourselves not as belonging to a community, which has a certain time management culture so we just maintain the status quo. i.e. because I am a Ghanaian, for instance, and it is known that Ghanaians are always one to two hours late to appointments, I have no choice but to follow the norm and adjust my life style to accommodate that culture.

As an individual, one needs to ask himself the most attitude changing question towards time - what is my one second, one minute, one hour, one day, one week, one month and one year worth?

If we can truly value our time in terms of money lost or gain, we would appreciate time better than we do now. It may probably not have to be just money, but at the end of the day money is the common denominator for the acquisition of any imaginable thing in this world.

I used to have a very poor time management attitude. My wife and a couple of my good friends around me became too much for me to bear because they had very good time management cultures. One day I told myself, why should I always be on the wrong side of the coin when it comes to time management?

That question changed my life and it has changed my life forever. I would not say that my time management culture is now perfect, but there has been a major transformation ? a complete shift, far away from the usual Ghanaian time wasting attitude, where an appointment at say 1.00pm ends up becoming a 3.00pm appointment because of deliberate lateness.

I run a Christian organization and we have such a strict time management culture that sometimes our clients and other colleagues of ours find us too much to bear. We have come to understand that in the developed world good attitude to time is what really makes the difference between the poor and the rich. In fact the same applies to the difference between developed and undeveloped nations.

As individuals we do not have to adopt the community or national culture of poor time management. The change would not begin from the national level ? it always has and always would begin with the individual, then the family, then the community (working, social etc) and then to the various sectors before it finally goes national.

In my organization for instance, even though we have a strict time management culture, for which we do our best never to be late to any appointment, some individual members of the organization are still struggling with the issue of lateness. There two particular members who seem to hold a patent on lateness and really contend with each other for the title of the lateness champion. But I can say that one in leading the other by far.

Funny as it may sound it is a very bad attitude. So bad it borders on sin. It is like wasting life itself because the length of one?s life on this earth is one's age, which is nothing more than the sum total of time. Age is just the totality of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years one spent on earth.

So if you waste time through lateness, laziness, indecision, procrastination and other bad attitudes, you are wasting life and you may have to answer to your maker one day.

For once, as an individual forget about what the people around you are doing with their time and think, what is my time worth; what am I losing over time and what am I gaining over time. How is my attitude to time affecting what I do and the people I work with?

It is only selfish people, who do not care about whose time they waste and what the consequences are to them and to others.

I am not suggesting any hard, point by point, step by step time management principles and rules. For once look at your own life and make a decision to stop being late to appointments no matter what. Even if no one is on you to keep to time, just do it for yourself. That is the beginning of a good time management culture.

Begin to hate yourself and nobody else for being late to appointments and refuse to make excuses for your lateness, even if you have one. Blame only yourself and nothing or nobody else for your lateness.

One colleague of mine is always-rpt-always late to appointments and there is only one reason he is not able to change - because he doesn't blame himself for his lateness - he is hardly ever sorry for his lateness - he almost always finds some excuse and something else to blame for his lateness instead of himself. Often times he would even tell a lie about his location when he is late and we call him on phone out of anxiety. It?s all attitude; wrong attitude robs him and most of us of the joy of having control on time. I used to make excuses for my poor attitude to time, but I had to say a loud HAY!!!!!! to myself one day and speak strongly to myself looking in a mirror and that was the turning around for me. And friend I can tell you from experience that there is great joy in having control over your time.

I never thought I would able to do it, but I did it and I am a happy person now. Indeed there is nothing more to it than the individual?s attitude. There is really no need to say how a family, community or nation could manage time without the individual starting it. On the contrary, when the individual does it, it would automatically reflect in our family, community and national lives.

There is something interesting about attitude ? the word ATTITUDE, when converted into numbers, alphabet by alphabet and summed up, would give 100(%), which means for any good result one wants in any aspect of one?s life, including time management, the key is attitude.

Once again let me ask you: what is your one hour, 30 minutes worth. I hope it is worth more than nothing, unlike the trotro driver in my opening Ningo story.

Good luck to you on your first step towards a better time management culture. And remember GMT is Greenwich Mean Time and not Ghana Maybe Time.

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.