This March, Ghana turns 61. It’s been sixty one years since Dr. Kwame Nkrumah declared that the struggle for independence was over and that we were ready to hold the reins of our destiny. How time flies! We have come quite a long way as a people and as i sit to ponder over this nation i cherish so much, i ask myself what it means to be Ghanaian. I ask myself if we are where we were meant to be as a people. I was certain about the first question but i sadly wasn’t so sure of the latter.
What makes us Ghanaian? How do i answer that question? I remembered a video i watched that came from a certain supposed affluent country in Africa. In the video, there was this huge and long truck carrying what appeared to be a fruit juice in transparent bottles, stacked up to the very top of vehicle. I saw at the beginning, a group of young men stealing the juice from the back of the truck as it was stuck in very slow moving traffic. Within seconds, the theft had graduated into a whole community thing. People from the neighbourhood without shame just ran to the side of the road and stole as much juice as they could carry, smiling as the went back to their homes. This happened in broad daylight and the community conspired to steal from the moving truck without conscience. They continued to steal till the vehicle got out of the traffic. I was bewildered! I was awed! Though Ghana is far from being a perfect country, all i could think in my mind was, “This would never happen in Ghana”. I may not have said who a Ghanaian was by this example, but i knew who a Ghanaian wasn’t.
In my life as a Ghanaian, i have come to meet people from all over the country, from the north to the south, east to the west. I have had the opportunity to live in other parts of the country and i could beat my chest and say, there isn’t much difference between us, no matter the ethnic group or religion. It’s almost like once you have the tag ‘Ghanaian’, you have a certain calmness and grace about you. I have heard stories of people from other countries who said they could easily tell Ghanaians from citizens of other countries because of certain peculiarities we share as a people. This is a country that Christians and Muslims stand side by side, people from different ethnicities mingle and that is something we cannot brush aside. It is something we have to deepen and make stronger as the years go by.
Am i proud of my country? Yes! Would i want to be Ghanaian in my next life? Yes! But is Ghana where she’s supposed to be at? That’s where i would slightly look down and say, “No, i don’t think so”. From the time i could read and understand English, there has been one phrase i have probably heard more than any other in the news items on radio and television- “Ghana is a potential……”
First, there’s nothing wrong with being a ‘potential’ but it becomes worrying when that potential remains a potential over several years. It’s like a pregnant woman carrying a baby. That pregnant woman is a potential mother and everyone expects that that baby would at a point, come out! In that case, the mother is no more a potential mother, but a mother. When after the due date the child is not coming, it means something is wrong either with the mother or the baby or both. Ghana has been called a potential in many many things, but if for sixty one years we still remain a potential, there is obviously something wrong with or in Ghana.
I believe if Ghana was human, she would cry out that she was fed up with that label. How many times haven’t i heard when i was growing up that Ghana had a huge tourism potential? I cannot count. We pride ourselves of being hospitable people. Being hospitable is a good thing but that is not the only thing tourists are looking for. You cannot have tourism with badly managed tour sites. Sites where sometimes tourists get there and they are told the tour guides have gone to farm? Are we supposed to be taken seriously? I remember my visit to the Kakum National Park. Awesome awesome place! A park that could rival any other park in any other part of the world, but have you seen the road that leads there? It’s so glaringly bad! We cannot see? That this road needs urgent fixing? I don’t get it! We are blessed with a shoreline. Exquisite beaches and all that, what do we do with them? We fill the beaches with filth! Potential tourism destination? Probably when we hear ‘potential’, we feel it is bound to happen by itself. It doesn’t work that way.
We ought to be proactive as a people. For a country that prides itself as the first sub-Saharan country to gain independence, we need to lead! We need to show the way. At this point in our lives, we should not be heavily depending on legacies of the first president. We should have built on it! That is what progress is about- building on what is there. However, not only are we dependent on post-colonial legacies, we have left them in ruins. Look at the Tema motor way that was constructed by Dr. Nkrumah. I used it a few days ago and on the entire stretch from Accra to Tema, there was no single street light-not a single one. The potholes were scary and many and this is a road that has toll booths that collects money every day and night from the populace. The accidents and lives that have been claimed on that road, let’s not even talk about it. So now people pay tolls to go and try their luck on a death trap road? You pay a toll to go see if you would die or not? You see we would remain a potential if we don’t find ways to solve our problems!
It’s easy to say Ghana is a potential bread basket for our sub-region. It’s very easy to make that claim. Do we just pay lip service to it? I was in Class 6 when my teacher told me that over 50% of Ghanaians were farmers. Really? Do we know the amount of rice that is imported into this country a year? We import over 500million dollars worth of rice into this country per year. And recently, there have been ridiculous importations like tomatoes and onions from countries closer to the Sahara than we are. Is our country that arid? No! It is our commitment to agriculture that is arid. It’s dry and just lip service. Google ‘Land of Chocolate’ and guess which country you would see…..Switzerland. Now tell me how many cocoa trees there are in Switzerland-probably zero. If you don’t own what you have, other’s would own it for you! Ghana together with Cote D’Ivoire produce 60% of the entire world’s cocoa. So how possibly are we still price takers? I have seen with my own eyes, cocoa farmers living in abject poverty. These farmers get just 5% of all the proceeds on cocoa products on the world markets. Where does the 95% go to? Your guess is as good as mine. In 2007 Malaysia came for oil palm seeds from Ghana. Ten years later, they are the second largest producer of oil palm with over 20million metric tonnes produced in 2017. In 2015, they generated 16.1billion USD from palm alone…something they came to take from here. We produced just 520 thousand metrix tonnes in 2017. See the difference…520,000 to 20million metric tonnes. It is not the potential, it is what you do with it. Didn’t we have the potential to be the top producers? We did!
Our politicians must change. We must start demanding more from them as a people. I find it sad when i hear NPP and NDC arguing over who had a better Credit Rating when they were in charge of the governance. Credit Rating is simply how viable you are as a borrower country in the eyes of the lender. What’s there to be proud about in being a borrower? It’s a mindset that is going to put stress on future generations. Our debt stock stands at 138billion cedis. That is about 30billion dollars using the average rate of exchange. That is stress! We must move away from the borrower’s mindset. Going cup in hand makes you a slave, they would tell you what to do and at the end, indirectly take everything back while you pay the debt with interest.
Move along the streets of Accra Central and you would find hundreds of thousands of people, both young and old, selling whatever they can find. Provision shops line every street. It makes me wonder what impact these petty selling makes on the economy of the country. How much profit can you make when you import something and sell for small profit? When would you be able to expand and employ others? It’s the same money that is circulating within the economy. To expand an economy, we have to produce! All these Asian economic tigers realised that they had to produce in order to grow. We cannot continue import and import, building the economies of other countries while we wait for miracles to happen in our own.
We are a beautiful people, no doubt. We are a great nation, no doubt but we cannot rest on our oars. The world is moving ahead so fast and we should not be left behind. Let’s do the right thing in our own small way. Why would you drink a sachet of water and throw it on the ground? A country that cannot manage something as basic as waste? What then can we manage? Gold? Oil? Why would you go to work at 10am instead of 8am just because it’s for the state? Why would you blatantly disregard road traffic regulations? Why would you take a bribe before you do something the state pays you to do? Pardon my Twi but there’s a song that says ‘S3 )man b3 y3 yie aa,efiri me ni wo’. To wit, the development of a country depends on you and me. No one would do it for us. Ghana is crying because her people are not being Ghanaian enough. Ghana is crying because she’s tired of being called a potential. Ghana wants to achieve. Ghana has to achieve!
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