On Selling Ghana To Elon Musk

K1 – Koo, have you heard?

K2 – Heard what? All you ever do is to “hear” and “hear” of things ....

K1 – But if I don't, you will sit here in your blissful ignorance and someone will come and catch you and sell you to some white man, who will take you to the planet Mars, and experiment with your body to see whether he can make it survive on that dead planet or not!

• What?

• Ahah! Now you are interested?

• Of course I am!
• No, you sit there! They will sell you and I shall have to sit here and sing laments like “Madamfo pa beko agya me, ah-ah-ah...” [My good friend has gone and left me alone! Blah-blah-blah!”]

• Hey, that's a very beautiful song.

–All nice songs in Ghana have a melancholic, bitter-sweet content, don't they? Take “Stormy Ass... or Bebrebe yi.... or Wobegyaa me o, Jack;, mabedu!....or Wofa Nono.... and Odoyewu akoda agya me....Or the mother of all pathos: Mmoborowa!..

• Yiee! I didn't know that you carried the whole list of Ghana's “Ancient Top Ten” in your head!
• There's so much you don't know. Well, what's eating you?
• An American guy called Elon Musk has just bought 44 billion dollars worth of shares in a company called Twitter....
• Isn't that the one that threw out Trump?
• Ei, you knew that? Well done.
• Did you say 44 billion dollars?
• Yes I did.
• 44 billion dollars? One man?
• Yes. It's such a huge amount that as soon as it became known, some of your people in Ghana who have earned certificates from educational institutions but haven't got an ounce of sense in their heads, began to get highly intoxicated merely thinking about it. They began to think of how they could lay hands on some of Musk's loot, and they came up with the idea of relating it to Ghana's external debt/gross domestic product ratio!
• What? In what way is Ghana's external debt connected to somebody buying shares in a company in his own country?
• Ask me! One of these counterfeit Ghanaians even suggested that since Musk was bringing Twitter Africa to Ghana, he should be invited to go the whole hog – pay off Ghana's debts for us, in exchange for us allowing him to take over Ghana!
• What? Are they mad? Do they know that the Asantes (who were stark illiterates in today's sense) valued their independence so much that they paid to the British, by way of “tributes”, enormous sums designated in gold dust, after the British had overcome the Asantes in the wars the Asantes fought against the British to try and retain their sovereignty? The British charged the Asantes money for fighting in defence of their own nation! And some of us want to sell the country in exchange for settling our foreign debts?
• My God! How could they even think of it?
• The annoying thing is the sheer ignorance behind the suggestion. Do they know how much profit British and American companies have made in the past 200 years, by buying Ghana's cocoa, timber, gold and manganese at prices dictated by themselves? Whilst, meanwhile, selling the goods we buy from their countries at whatever prices they demand for those imports?
• Yes! Cocoa – they told us how much they would pay us for it. But when it came to corned beef, or sugar, or cutlasses, we couldn't tell them what we would pay for it! No; they would tell us its price!
• And this has been going on for how many centuries?
• It's still being going on for over 300 years! For all brilliant economists know, this Elon Musk bloke owns shares in the British, American or French or German businesses that carry out the export-import trade with Ghana! Maybe he already deals in commodities as part of his “investment portfolio!”! And we are being asked to throw our cocoa at his feet!
• Ei, these brilliant book-long Ghanaians heard that he had been able to buy 44 billion Twitter shares and they thought: “Him who has, more will be added to it?”
• Ei, you remember your Scriptures? Yes, it's made them crazy: “Hey The Almighty wants us to invite Musk to come and buy Ghana and be our 'Salvation'!”
• And if you check, you may find out that many of those people went to big foreign Universities!
• Yes, when they were abroad, they didn't ever hear a Briton, a Frenchman or German even joke that America should buy Germany, because after the Second World War, America helped Germany to rebuild its industries.
• Or that since Britain was bailed out during and after the war with American “lend-lease” largesse, Britain should be owned by the USA!
• Man, what's wrong with OUR so-called intellectuals?
• Koo, the problem is that many of them are not true intellectuals at all. They dote on these reputable overseas educational institutions, but haven't caught on to the fact that the institutions value their British, Americans or French origins, which they strive to preserve. The institutions exist to serve their NATIONAL purposes. But our great “scholars” imbibe “knowledge” from them wholesale, without being able to subtract what was in it that was meant to meant to deceive foreigners to regurgitate to the benefit of the originators! The better foreigners become at parroting back what's been taught them, the more highly valued are the certificates bestow on them. And they come back to Africa and begin to apply that foreign knowledge to our local problems. “You've got external debts? Sell the country to a foreign millionaire!”

• Yiee! How can anyone even contemplate – EVEN AS A JOKE – the idea of selling a whole NATION to someone else?
• And not even to buy something important that can be useful economically, but to repay debts?
• How were the debts incurred in the first place?
• Irrelevant!” They will tell you that a country that has no debts is “credit-worthy”!
• Hahahahaha! Don't we pay a subscription to the IMF and the World Bank to bail us out when we run into debt?
• Sh-h-h-h-! That's a major international secret!
• Anyway, don't the debts attract interest?
• Koo, the whole thing doesn't make sense.
• Yes, if someone in the USA, for instance, made a suggestion that the US should be sold to repay the debts the US owes to China!!...
• He would be laughed out of court! And probably brought before the US Congress!
• But here, the media take the matter up when it appears on Facebook or Twitter and repeat it seriously!?
• Yes, they love the idea of someone merely sitting behind a computer and accumulating so much money that 44 billion is like two dollars to him!
• Yep! I am quite sure they are all ….
• Like him! Only money matters!
• Right!