Current Condition of Ghana

It’s been almost a month since I returned from my trip to Ghana. The Ghana I visited six years ago, now seems to be struggling to stand on its feet, post Rawlings’ rule, being nursed back to health with the leadership of a new guide President Kuffour, who hopefully with our prayers to our Almighty God, will lead her into new and uncharted territories of growth and development. But I have to add that Kuffour alone, no matter how extraordinarily talented he is, cannot unravel and resolve all the years and history of corrupt governments and the reckless abuse our mother Ghana has suffered. Most Ghanaians, unaware that this man is no sorcerer who can simply make all our problems disappear with just a wave of his presidential authority one year into his presidency, have resorted to complaints as a source of daily bread to undermine the little effort, which is perhaps his best effort, to make life better for Ghana and Ghanaians. It will take time and all of us united behind him, for him to succeed as president and for Ghana to be strong. The NDC has to remain an influential party, but only to check and balance the power of Kuffour and his NPP party. But the most important focus is to support the current president for the sake of Ghana. If Kuffour does well, Ghana and Ghanaians benefit and all will be well.

I have argued with my fellow Ghanaians that I was only five or so in 1979 when Rawlings took over power in Ghana. He brought only a gun and intimidation, and with his military background, little or no vision for Ghana. Kuffour, not to shower him with praise or anything, has at least shown us that he was a successful Oxford-trained attorney and seasoned politician who had already accumulated his wealth before he took over power in the 2000 elections. I play the angel’s advocate and give Kuffour the benefit of the doubt, in saying he has nothing to lose being president except to demonstrate how he obtained what he achieved in his private life on a grander scale, being the much needed bright, innovative leader and son of Ghana. I say if Kofi Annan can do what he has done for the United Nations without the U.S. paying the organization its huge operational dues, then perhaps Kuffour can learn a thing or two from his Ghanaian brother and do the same for our mother Ghana.

Again, I reiterate that Ghana’s problems must be puzzles for our bright, innovative and explorative minds. We have shown the world that the sons and daughters of Ghana and thus Africa do not possess the brains of the monkeys that live in our jungles, that we can adapt in any situation and make it anywhere in the world. The last time I heard there was a Ghanaian mechanic in Iceland. Iceland, I asked? Alaska? Maybe. Well, I buy that, but who in God’s big world would move from the tropics to Antarctica to live? This shows that if we strip ourselves off our lackadaisical attitudes and rid ourselves of being suppressed before becoming innovative to change our environment, then we would be the most industrious people on earth. If we can wake up with the crow of the cock at dawn, go and form long queues and sit for hours at the American Embassy after paying our last cedi for visa fees, without the guarantee of being issued a visa before we go abroad to suffer to prosper, plus being grievously disappointed if we are denied a visa after we paid our last cedi to the embassy, why don’t we use that same energy and money to make our own nation better and stay and be content where we are? And who said we could not? We would only venture to see what the rest of the world looked like and not to sell our souls. This is very doable people! We have used the lamps and candles from our secondary schools to enter the halls of academia everywhere. We can also envision futures and make them happen.

Let us visit Ghana before slavery and when she was colonized. Let us see how chiefs and queen mothers that exist into the present day governed our regions and tribes. We have always been independent. We were only ruled for a short period compared to the duration of being independent in the history of Ghana. It seems as if we lost our history, but even if we have, common sense like a compass must point us in the right direction. Us Philosophers have questioned appearances, but let us assume we are all not philosophers. We never came from slave ancestry but from an ancestry of people governed by kings and queens whether we are Ewes, Ashantis, Akuapims or Dagombas. We have to pick up from where we were interrupted. Let us with our adventurous and brilliant minds possess our heritage of innovation, fortitude and industriousness, just as we have clung to our hospitality and joy amid adverse circumstances.

The mind is a powerful thing we possess. With the mind we process every movement, every thought, everything that we absorb in to our system, of knowledge, of being, an instrument that controls our actions. As the Bible rightly puts it “As a man thinketh, so is he.” If we think we cannot do certain things regardless of circumstances, then our mind processes that and we act on that solid thought that we cannot even if we can. On the contrary if we think we can, then the mind begins to search for possibilities and avenues of making things possible or for things to happen. The mind begins to bloom with ways to defy the impossibilities…this I believe opened the way to current achievements in science and technology in the developed world. I often think of the Wright brothers and their experiments of getting a clunky apparatus to defy gravity in the air and not only that, get it to travel great lengths at great speeds. What the hell were they thinking? Well, they gave us commercial airlines. We have to monitor our minds closely and to make sure we use it in ways that benefit us the most instead of ways that weaken us the most. After all a mind is a terrible thing to waste, especially when Ghana could benefit from all this waste.

I have stressed on re-educating our minds and checking Ghanaian business and work ethics, especially in Ghana, in past articles. Ghanaians are among the most educated people in the world, but we need to be shaken from our complacent stupor of doing things the same old unproductive way. Call it tradition or whatever. These days, I cannot stomach people who are adept at identifying every single problem Ghana has but who cannot get their well manicured fingers dirty with work to change things. What use is your knowledge when it cannot be used? I liken it to salt losing its saltiness. What good is it except to be trampled on? Or empty pots clanging and making unnecessary clamor. Ghana deserves better than that? We have to stop pointing at what is wrong and whose fault it was. A kind of Puritan witch-hunt for a whodunit drama. The whites! It’s their fault…but they returned our independence back to us some thirty something years ago, with some if not all of our money. Haven’t some African leaders embezzled more money than these white folks who colonized us? Mobuto in fashionable leopard skin gear alone had billions stowed away in Swiss accounts when his government was in tattered beggar clothes. Come on!

Kwame Nkrumah built the Tema Motorway and Peduase Lodge and the roads that lead beyond this historic Ghanaian landmark, to name a few of his accomplishments, with some of the money Ghana had back then. We still have a legacy he left behind. What a hero! Someone whose work still exists and inspires people like me who never met him. A young, brilliant visionary like all of us, a very young man like you and me who only went to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania! But we have done way better and have been to the Dartmouths, Yales and Harvards and Browns and every school in between the Ivies that were not plants we had to climb. We who proudly hang our achievements, if not on our sleeves in lush positions at Fortune 500 companies excluding Enron, in our bathrooms or anywhere we can leisurely and conveniently gaze at them adoringly. But what a lie! No, Kwame Nkrumah did best when with scarce resources and with the oppressor barely off his back and property, began a tremendous job of jump-starting Ghana again after independence just as Yaa Asantewa fought the British with unsophisticated weapons of war. Again, they only possessed nothing compared to what we have been blessed with today…freedom from the oppressor and vast knowledge through advanced education and sophisticated technology. And what do we do? Parade our pomposity to anyone we can prey on or impress with our sophisticated acquired knowledge, intelligently concealed in multiple PhDs, MDs, MBAs and whatnots and on certificates of our intellectual worthiness.

Rawlings, our last president built a car park and then named it after himself? I visited Rawlings Park at Makola after I inquired of any such achievement by Rawlings during his entire twenty-year reign and my brother, an avid NDC supporter blurted out “Rawlings Park.” I have one thing to say. What a damn shame and a disgrace it was that we had him for that long! An entire generation has been left in the dark about what true leadership is. The thing is we haven’t had a true leader for years. Someone with spirit and fire strong enough to melt and purge Ghana of what ails it and metamorphose her. An ordinary car park named after Rawlings, his hero, in my brother’s view was a leader’s idea of progress and leadership. What good can come out of that? I’ll be dogonne damned if I didn’t know better. So let the blind lead the blind. Let’s fastforward Rawlings altogether and blame the witches of Ghana, but they are very powerless and clueless when it comes to progress, so what good are they too?

History does not teach us to forget what happened to us, neither does it tell us to mark time when we already know what happened to us. History teaches us to take what is, the goodness and mistakes of the past and like a lamp, a guide in a dark and unpredictable future, aid us to chart our own present course in life for those behind us to follow in our own histories we make today. We have to put an abrupt end to what we already know is wrong and begin to aggressively work or tackle these issues with our knowledge and expertise whiles we still have our youth and fresh minds. We need to change our way of thinking with the rapidly changing world and begin to make strides if we are ever to catch up with the rest of the world, or even if not in competition with the world, to begin to improve our way of life and contribute to the welfare of the world.

How can we begin to really exercise our PhDs and MDs and MBAs and all the degrees in between to their fullest so we can leave behind legacies for our grandchildren? By flexing our intellectual muscles on perplexing issues that continue to dog our mother nation. Someone mentioned to me in utter amazement, “What do you mean by that? After all the struggle in Ghana, GCE O levels, A levels, unemployment and no hope for the future, Ghanaian stowaways being coldly and brutally murdered on ships on their way to France or some other developed nation, to better their lives and you tell me what? Go back to where to do what? I’ll build my own house in Ghana when I want and live in it away from anyone else. That will be my contribution. Or I will start my own private business. It’ll be my contribution. Politics be damned and I’ll drive my Beamer on those rough dusty roads. Heck if I should join my neighbor to build the common road that links all our properties. Let all Ghanaian politicians be damned and the stupid people who vote them into power!”

Like I tell everyone who will listen, let’s assume we all build our beautiful homes and buy everything imaginable for this posh home not forgetting the gleaming hooded Beamer fully air-conditioned to beat the Ghanaian heat, but God forbid get into an accident on the narrow unkempt roads and are taken to an understaffed and inefficiently run abandoned hospital as a result of underpaid staff, then what? Brothers and sisters, let us think way ahead before we get into this precise situation or our daughter or our mother or anybody else God forbid! I haven’t yet heard the chilling scream of an ambulance running to scoop up bloodied victims of everyday accidents to emergency rooms before they run out of blood flowing from their bodies into the earth. I said I haven’t, like I haven’t yet seen wild animals rampantly roaming in fictitious safari jungles in the minds of foreigners when they think of Africa.

We have to begin to prepare for the future by getting busy today. I have not heard a single Ghanaian wanting to retire in a nursing home in America. We all have plans of going back to Ghana someday to retire comfortably and to enjoy our years of labor at home and abroad. Yes, the same Ghana we have scorned, chastised, and ignored. We want to go home to better roads on which we can drive our latest Mercedes, in homes that have daily supply of water and electricity, no matter the season and reason, to better well-equipped hospitals and well-paid homegrown doctors and nurses, whom we can entrust our fragile health as we age beautifully. I for one, complained viciously into the irritated ears of my family when my luggage was delayed for two eternal weeks on a two week, two days vacation to Ghana, but what did I expect? The newly renovated, high-tech John F. Kennedy Airport with a tunnel leading all the way from the tarmac to the luxurious shop-lined airport interior to lead me all the way into Kotoka International Airport? What the hell was I thinking when I mistook the roads of Ghana for the broad double, triple, quadruple-laned highways and byways of let’s say Chicago when I had ignored the welfare of Ghana all this while? We travel abroad and ignore what is going on at home only to return to be baffled by the slow or lack of advancement back home in Ghana. Whose work is it anyway? Those stuck in there can only imagine the facility of movement and ease with which we have access to means of daily living, so how can they be motivated by advancements anywhere? What resources do they have anyway even if they could. This is why Rawlings, after all his travels, in putting up Rawlings Park which he generously named after himself, still remains a mystery to me. Had he heard of multiple storied parking garages at the Waldorf Astoria where he slept on presidential visits even if he was bent on building a car park? I would have never associated my name with that overcrowded, ordinary park he proudly built.

To summarize, those of us who have been educated through travel abroad ought to retire in Ghana in style to better and comfortable and convenient infrastructures, to a sound retirement of healthy fresh life on our healthy beautiful beaches (thank God Ghana is not landlocked) and on a healthy path to a bright future we have laid ourselves for our offspring.

How do we begin? Through an organization like Ghana Cyber Group. So the name sounds fishy. We will change it to sound exactly the way you want it to sound. Well, I want to trust the people who have been entrusted with my money for change. Well, I say if you can make a better preacher, step into the pulpit and preach and teach like you want things done. Well inform me when things are cooked. Who is supposed to do all the cooking so who can eat when things are cooked? My beloved brothers and sisters, fellow Ghanaians, we have to all cook the food so we can all enjoy our cooking.

Our dear brother, Yaw Owusu, in my opinion, a blooming leader, has collected the firewood and he has the pot ready...he founded Ghana Cyber Group, a pot where we can begin to assemble our expertise, our ingredients. He will need the fire, all our support and guidance. Yaw Owusu has taken it upon himself to found such a source for change and improvement in Ghana through the organization, Ghana Cyber Group. If distance or circumstances cannot allow you to do what he is doing, please allow someone with the knowledge, expertise, and time to represent you and to be accountable for every dime you put into their care. Invest privately, but invest in a common safe where we can quietly but surely improve our motherland Ghana. Let us allow our benefactors, foreign aid givers, who genuinely or otherwise want to help us, take a breather for once. Ghanaians can help their fellow Ghanaians. Well, except for charitable organizations like the Kaplan Fund, which promises to match the funds we raise, if we as a group collectively and charitably make an effort like our benefactors.

I am imploring my fellow Ghanaians to respond in their kindness and intellectual prowess to exhibit their caring and thoughtful nature as sons and daughters of an ill-treated and battered mother, our nation Ghana, for us to return to her, if not physically, return mentally and wholeheartedly to beautify her and to nurse her back to her days of glory when she was truly known as the “ Gold Coast”, a proud mother whose beauty was unsurpassed and who showcased Kings and Queens and the Princesses that we all are today. Ghana needs each and every one of us…the Harvard-trained lawyer, the John Hopkins-trained physician, the Yale-trained nurse, the Columbia trained investment banker, the Pentecostal preacher, the New Jersey live-in, the Marriott Hotel dishwasher. We all can make a big difference in each other’s lives. I urge each and every one of us to participate and to leave behind our pride and egos and paper achievements and together roll up our sleeves and begin work on our mother Ghana as she ages. This is my message from her to you all her children.

Thank you all!