RE-ENGINEERING THE GHANAIAN MENTALITY FOR 2057

By Mawutodzi K. Abissath

Daily Graphic,  23/10/ 2007

An African proverb prompts us that: “if Sunday will be magnificent and glorious, it is Saturday that will send the signal.” The year 2007 seems to be poised to be “butubutu paaa.” Ghana will be 50 years old. The golden jubilee fiver is already being felt in the year 2006. But this writer is thinking of the year 2057 when Ghana will be celebrating her 100 years of independence.

Well, there is nothing wrong with celebrating a golden jubilee of one’s country in grand style. But if you take Ghana as your personal loving mother who is celebrating her 50th birthday on sick bed, suffering from, say, a stroke. How will you feel? This is why this writer will like to caution that we should not over jubilate while our mother Ghana has one side of her brain not functioning properly.

The truth is that it is we Ghanaians who made Ghana what it is today; whether good or bad. There might be some external forces that might have contributed to our forwardness or backwardness, depending on your own philosophy of life. Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Whichever you are, let’s remember this African proverb which says:

“When you spit on the ground, you don’t collect it back with your tongue.” In other words, in this context, it will not serve us any purpose to engage in blame game. Shall we look ahead and make Ghana a better place to live in in the next 50 years than we have had it in the last half a century?

Wealth

Ghana, by all standards is not a pour country at all. Ghana has been endowed with unimaginable natural resources, such as gold, diamond, bauxite, manganese, even there is some oil somewhere, only we don’t seem to know where and how to extract that oil. Is it in the Keta lagoon or in the lake Bosomtwi? We are not too sure which is which.

Where are the Ghanaian geologists and other relevant scientists? Ghana has cocoa, coffee, cotton and even cashew. Ghana has ground-nut, palm-nut, coco-nut, shed-nut, cola-nut, tiger-nut, and what not? Ghana has arable lands lying fallow from Ningo in the Greater Accra region to Bongo in the Upper East region that can grow any food crop under the sun, such as maize, rice, millet, sorghum, soya beans and other beans.

As for cassava, yam, coco-yam and plantain, even if we plant them on top of the Kwahu Mountains they will yield. Fruits? Ghana has mangoes, oranges, pineapples, guava, avocado pea, bananas, black berets and many more. Livestock? Ghana has one of the most conducive tropical climates on this planet of free air that can breed any livestock from the kingdom of animals. Is it cattle, poultry, piggery or what? Ghana can produce tortoises, ostriches and even crocodiles for export. As for snails, they are roaming in our forests free of charge. We only have to pick them and have sumptuous palm-nut cum “kontomire” soups. “wo mpe wo yi a – wo pe dien?” To wit: if you don’t like this – what do you want in life?

Rivers, you mean? Ghana has some of the most magnificent rivers in Africa. We have Pra River, Densu River, Ankobra River, and others that are yet to be discovered by Mongo Park? As for the Volta River, it started flowing from the belly of land-locked Burkina Faso. When it reached Ghana, nature ordered it to spread its octopus-like tentacles on our soil before heading to the gulf of guinea into the Atlantic Ocean. And it has been flowing all year-round non-stop since the day the Creator instructed it to do so.

But we are still sleeping in darkness because we cannot develop the appropriate technology to convert the running waters into dams for any productive purposes, be it for irrigation of legumes or hydro-electric power for our universities, where engineers are being produced. In Singapore, it took a teenage girl engineer to solve the human waste problem by inventing a machine that converts rubbish into electric power.

Look at Libya; they have no such natural rivers anywhere. Yet they have been able to create an artificial river from under the ground and they are turning their deserts into virgin forests. Even ordinary carrots we have to import them from Burkina Faso for our “wakye” sellers to use. Where are the Ghanaian agricultural specialists? Is something fundamentally wrong with us Ghanaians? Can we take a second look at our educational system again? Ghanaians are capable people by nature. Just take the out-going UN Secretary-General, Busumuru Kofi Annan, as an epitome the Ghanaian.

Now, it appears we cannot solve any simple socio-economic problems on our own. Rather, when the seemingly natural death of the expression “culture of silence” occurred in the Ghanaian vocabulary, everybody was plunged and baptised in the sea of free talks. As a result, almost every Ghanaian has become a “born-again-talking consultant”, working as experts in the talking industry of the country.

Things to watch

As long as we respond to the accolade of the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC), we must take it that Ghana, our beloved mother land, has one part of its body paralysed. The question we must ask ourselves is: Why do we have so much, yet we are so poor? And the majority of our people are taking slave salaries that cannot take them from the bank to their homes? You don’t have to go to Jerusalem to look for the answers. The answers are our mind-set, attitude, behaviours, conducts, actions, deeds, comportments and life style.

 What do I mean? If one person will like to fill his belly to the brim of his mouth while others can starve to hell, is it the best philosophy of life? Greed and selfishness. Corruption, bribery, dishonesty, malfeasance, fraud and narcotic ventures. We must watch these little, little things as we embark on the celebration of our golden jubilee as a nation.

Political corruption, where one person will want to carry the entire national revenue for the year into a canoe and paddle it across the high seas and dump it into a corrupt bank in Europe and elsewhere, so that when he or she is no longer in power, he or she can go and “chop” it alone.

Cultural corruption, where one traditional ruler who has the custody of the land in trust for his people, will want to sell all the lands without thinking of the third generation. Even after selling the lands, instead of investing the proceeds into productive ventures for the unborn youth, he or she will use the money to marry 177 wives and spend the rest on “homeboy” or “kill me quick” or “agban”, popularly known as apketeshie. Why?

Religious corruption, where one so-called “man of god” will use all modern marketing strategies in the name of Jesus, to extort the last Ghana Cedi from the orphans among the congregation. Then he will buy a private jet for himself and his “Osofomami” and be junketing the globe, preaching prosperity minus salvation, while the poor souls resign themselves to a corner in the kingdom of poverty. All this, my brother, makes Ghana what it is today. Do we have to blame somebody for our woes?

It is against this backdrop that I say we Ghanaians need mental re-engineering for the coming 50 years. Re-engineering, according to Dr.Colin Quek of the National University of Singapore, means: “the fundamental rethinking and radical re-design of an entire business system.” In this context, let’s take Ghana as a business entity. To re-engineer, you must re-focus. And to re-focus you must change. When changing, you must know where you are coming from, where you are and where you want to be. The goal of reengineering is quality rather than quantity.

Therefore, as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of our nationhood in 2007, we should not over-dose ourselves with jubilation and self aggrandisement. We must not plunge ourselves into the sea of champagne and whisky, imported with the scare foreign exchange we must use to develop our agaric sector to produce enough food to feed ourselves and our industries.

Every Ghanaian citizen has a responsibility to help the government of the day to make life a bit more meaningful for all of us. We must change our approach to duty. Our work ethics must change for the better. A situation where we treat government or public property as none of our business must change. That is what I mean by re-engineering of the Ghanaian mentality. Period!

As we jubilate, we must not forget the fact that some other Ghanaians sacrificed their lives to make it possible for us to celebrate a golden jubilee of nationhood in 2007. We must be grateful to them for their efforts. What legacy shall we also leave for those who will celebrate the centenary of our mother Ghana in 2057?

The author works with information services department ISD  abissath@gmail.com

NB: this article was first published by the Daily Graphic,  23/10/ 2007