Ghana Must Stop Mistaking Motion For Progress

There is a peculiar Ghanaian gift for celebration in the middle of crisis. We can open a cocoa season with fanfare while farmers still wait on last season's arrears. We can unveil aircraft while teachers walk off the job. We can host the world for a tourism expo while the United Nations tells us, politely but pointedly, that we have failed to house our own people. This week alone gave me whiplash: strikes and summits, price rises and price shortfalls, a death that silenced a boardroom, gunfire that silenced two townships, and a sky full of new wings that cannot yet fly over the ground realities beneath them. I write this column, as I always do, not to flatter power but to hold a mirror to it — Ghanaian and African alike — because a nation that will not look honestly at itself is a nation rehearsing its own decline.

I. The Classroom Betrayed — Again On Friday, September 25, 2026, Ghana's three major teacher unions — GNAT, NAGRAT and PRETAG — declared a nationwide strike, citing delayed negotiation of a new Collective Agreement, the failure to place newly promoted teachers on correct salary scales since exams passed in December 2025 and February 2026, and the non‑implementation of the Deprived Area Allowance owed under the 2024 Collective Agreement. This is not the first time. Back in August 2026, the unions threatened similar action over the same promotion‑placement issue, only to suspend it after an emergency meeting with Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu on August 31, with government promising that all affected teachers would be placed on their correct salary scales and arrears settled by September. That promise died on the vine. The Education Minister is now scheduled to meet the unions again on Monday, September 28, alongside the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission and the Controller and Accountant‑General's Department.

I ask plainly: what does it say about a republic when the people entrusted to shape its children must strike, twice in two months, simply to be paid what they are owed? A government cannot claim to prize education while treating the men and women who deliver it as an afterthought squeezed between ministries.

"Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to act." (Proverbs 3:27)

"Give the laborer his wage before his sweat dries." — a hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), reported in Sunan Ibn Majah, and echoed in the Qur'an's repeated command to fulfil covenants: "O you who believe! Fulfil your obligations." (Surah Al‑Ma'idah 5:1)

Scripture across traditions converges on one point: withheld wages are not a technicality, they are an injustice. Our teachers deserve better than becoming annual collateral damage in bureaucratic delay.

II. Cocoa's New Price — Progress, But Progress on Whose Terms?

There was better news, on paper, from Koforidua's neighbour in the cocoa belt. COCOBOD's Chief Executive, Dr Ransford (Randy) Abbey, opened the 2026/2027 season by raising the producer price from GH¢41,392 to GH¢42,400 per tonne — GH¢2,650 for a farmer's 64‑kilogramme bag, a rise of about 2.4 percent, representing 71.18 percent of the realised Free‑On‑Board price under the newly enacted Ghana Cocoa Board Act, 2026, which guarantees farmers a minimum of 70 percent of gross FOB value. COCOBOD says it has also fully deployed the Ghana Cocoa Traceability System nationwide, aimed at meeting the European Union's Deforestation Regulation set to bite from December 30, 2026.

I welcome the legal floor — a guaranteed share of FOB value is a genuine structural gain for farmers, hard‑won and worth defending. But let us not confuse a 2.4 percent increase with prosperity. Côte d'Ivoire, the world's largest cocoa producer, has set its own 2026/2027 main‑crop farmgate price at 1,200 CFA francs per kilogramme, and any wide gap between the two countries' prices risks smuggling and cross‑border leakage that Ghana can ill afford. A farmer feeding a family on cocoa cannot eat a traceability certificate. Reform of the financing architecture — including the mooted Cocoa Notes Programme to raise domestic capital for cocoa purchases — matters only if it translates into money reaching the farmgate on time, every season, without the arrears and delays that have plagued past years.

III. The United Nations Comes to Judge Our Rooftops

As if scripted for this column, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Koldo Casla, began a twelve‑day mission to Ghana on September 28, engaging government, local authorities, civil society and residents on housing shortages, affordability, overcrowding, sanitation and the growth of informal settlements — against the backdrop of an estimated 1.8‑million‑unit housing deficit.

I find it almost too on‑the‑nose that this scrutiny lands the same week teachers strike over unpaid allowances and cocoa farmers negotiate for scraps above a legal floor. Housing, education, and fair pay for farm labour are not separate crises; they are one crisis wearing different clothes — a persistent failure to let ordinary productivity translate into ordinary dignity. I hope Mr Casla's report does not simply gather dust in Geneva, as so many before it have.

"Woe to him who builds his house without righteousness, and his upper rooms without justice, who makes his neighbour serve him for nothing and does not give him his wages." (Jeremiah 22:13)

"And do not consume one another's wealth unjustly... And do not deprive people of their due." (Surah Al‑Baqarah 2:188; Surah Al‑A'raf 7:85)

IV. Koforidua's Moment in the Sun There is, admittedly, something to celebrate without irony this week. Ghana chose the Eastern Region to host World Tourism Day 2026, merging it with the week‑long Eastern Expo in Koforidua from September 26 to October 3 under the theme "Unlocking Opportunities for Sustainable Trade, Tourism and Investment," with all 33 municipal and district assemblies of the region — grouped into the Kwahu, Akyem, Krobo, Akuapem and New Juaben blocks — showcasing their trade and tourism potential. The global World Tourism Day theme this year, "Digital Agenda and Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism," pushed Tourism Minister Abla Dzifa Gomashie to argue that digital tools "could transform how we market our destinations" while insisting digital transformation must "complement, rather than replace, the authenticity that makes Ghana unique".

I like the sentiment. Boti Falls, the Umbrella Rock, Aburi's botanical gardens and Bunso's eco‑tourism site do not need artificial intelligence to be beautiful — they need roads that survive the rainy season, guides who are paid a living wage, and marketing budgets that outlast a single expo week. AI can amplify a good story; it cannot substitute for the basic infrastructure that turns a tourist's curiosity into a tourist's visit.

V. A Boardroom in Mourning Ghana's insurance and banking sector lost one of its most consequential women this week. Hollard Ghana announced the death of its Group CEO, Patience Enyonam Akyianu, who died on Sunday, September 20, 2026, after joining the company in October 2018 as its first‑ever Group Chief Executive Officer, having previously served as Managing Director of Barclays Bank Ghana. The company said she was "instrumental in transforming Hollard Ghana into the dynamic, market‑leading force it is today," a "visionary whose guidance made insurance more accessible to thousands across Ghana". She was also a founding member of the Executive Women Network and the International Women's Forum, Ghana.

I pause here deliberately, because our national conversation moves so fast that even a towering career gets a news cycle and nothing more. A woman who broke a glass ceiling twice — in banking, then in insurance — deserves to be remembered by more than an obituary scroll.

"The memory of the righteous is a blessing." (Proverbs 10:7)

"Indeed, we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we will return." (Surah Al‑Baqarah 2:156)

VI. South Africa's Weekend of Slaughter — A Warning We Cannot Afford to Ignore

I turn now to the story that should unsettle every government on this continent. In the space of roughly a week, South Africa suffered mass shootings that killed nearly 38 people. Eleven people, including a pregnant woman, were killed on Tuesday, September 23, when multiple gunmen attacked a house party in KwaMakhutha township near Durban. Then, late on Saturday, September 26, eight gunmen armed with AK‑47 rifles and pistols opened fire at a bar in Wedela township southwest of Johannesburg, killing 17 people and wounding 15, shooting patrons outside before moving indoors to continue. Roughly four hours later, in the early hours of Sunday, gunmen killed at least 10 people and wounded 11 more at a store linked to an entertainment venue in Lwandle township near Cape Town. As of Sunday, no arrests had been made in either of the weekend attacks.

South Africa's police service is hunting gunmen across three of its major metropolitan regions simultaneously, in a country that already carries one of the world's highest homicide rates. I do not raise this to indulge in the tired habit of pointing at another African nation's pain from a safe distance. I raise it because the conditions that breed this — entrenched inequality, informal settlements without adequate policing or economic opportunity, illegal firearms circulating freely, and township communities left to absorb the violence that formal governance failed to prevent — are not uniquely South African. They are structural conditions that persist, in different degrees, across our region. A housing deficit of 1.8 million units, as the UN just reminded us of our own country, is not merely a statistic about walls and roofs; overcrowded, under‑serviced, poorly lit settlements are also, unfortunately, the terrain where such violence festers when other safeguards fail. Ghana's relative peace is a genuine blessing, not a guarantee.

"Whoever kills a soul... it is as if he had slain all mankind entirely." (Surah Al‑Ma'idah 5:32)

"You shall not murder." (Exodus 20:13)

VII. Ghana's Wings, Still Testing the Air

Finally, to the sky — where Ghana's ambitions, at least, are soaring. Africa World Airlines unveiled its first Embraer E190 aircraft at Accra's Kotoka International Airport on September 19, 2026, the opening move of a planned ten‑aircraft fleet expansion, with founder and chairman Togbe Afede XIV signalling further acquisitions over the next year. Meanwhile, government's long‑promised national flag carrier — Ghana's aviation identity has been orphaned since Ghana International Airlines collapsed in 2010 — remains, in the Transport Ministry's own words, "on track," with Transport Minister Joseph Bukari Nikpe citing advanced regulatory groundwork, fleet planning and route development, and insisting the airline would launch within 2026. Industry watchers report that global carriers are already circling the opportunity, even as private operator Air Ghana eyes its own scheduled domestic passenger routes to Kumasi and Tamale.

I want to believe in a Ghanaian flag carrier again. I remember the pride of Ghana Airways before its books collapsed under debt, and the shorter‑lived hope of Ghana International Airlines. Ambition is not the problem; execution has always been our undoing. Before we paint a new tail fin, government should show us the balance sheet discipline that killed the last two carriers, or we will simply be financing a third funeral in a decade.

The Thread That Ties It All Together Strip away the headlines, and you find one Ghana wrestling with one question: will we let our institutions serve the people who built them, or will we keep asking teachers, farmers, tenants and the newly bereaved to wait their turn behind press conferences and ribbon‑cuttings? South Africa's township graves this week are a brutal reminder of what happens when a state's promises and a people's patience finally come apart at the seams. Ghana is not there. But complacency is how nations arrive at crises they never saw coming.

"Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." (Proverbs 14:34)

"Indeed, Allah orders justice and good conduct." (Surah An‑Nahl 16:90)

I remain, as ever, unafraid to say what needs saying.

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams