The Ghanaian Attitude – a Bane to National Development?

Almost two weeks ago, I posted an article in which I compared the relative success of Singapore as a nation to the failure that is Ghana (considering that both had independence not many years apart). In conclusion, I pinpointed “attitude” as the primal cause of Singapore’s success and progress from third world status to first, and why we, on the other hand and paradoxically, remain a third world country daily begging alms from the Western world.

Singapore’s success may have something to do with its location, the skin colour of its people, and its geographic size, but most important of all is the attitude of its people. Ghana hasn’t failed to progress from third world status to first because of its location in Africa or the skin colour of its people. It is our attitude as a people that has over the years and decades impeded our growth.

What am I talking about anyway? What is this Ghanaian attitude? And how does it encumber our development as a nation?

It has to do with our thinking, mentality, behavioral patterns, and character. In a word, ethos; our general ethos as a people; what we believe in, what we believe about ourselves and our environment, what we think about ourselves and our capabilities, and how this thinking influences our behavior, actions and inaction.

Picture this scenario – a young man goes to cash money at the bank. He sees a long queue of people waiting to do same, and thinks it not worth his while to join the up and wait. He starts looking around the banking hall, hoping for a miracle, sees a guy he shared a room with at the university in one of the checkout counters, and he’s good and gone.

That may seem a harmless thing to do, but it is corrupt, and that’s a young man who’s likely to indulge in more corrupt practices in future (if and when necessary). Same goes for the friend who helped him out. What if the other people waiting in queue also knew people working at the bank? What do you think would happen? Chaos, no doubt.

Second scenario – an elderly woman goes to seek admission at a local college for her daughter. She is informed that no vacancy exists, but persists in trying to get her daughter into the school. She ends up talking to and greasing the palm of a lecturer who is “cosy-rosy” with the school head. Not long afterwards, some poor fellow’s admission gets rescinded for non-early payment of fees, and his place given to the elderly woman’s daughter. Now, that’s a woman likely to indulge in more corrupt practices in future. And woe unto us, if she harbors political ambitions.

Someone may be wondering what such individual acts and/or behavioral patterns have got to do with Ghana’s development as a nation, and I will say a lot. Of course, there are corrupt individuals in Singapore. Of course, not all of them are squeaky clean. But they don’t form a majority. The number of corrupt people in Singapore, I presume, is not so much so that it can have a negative effect on the country’s development.

Put another way, corruption is curtailed to an extent. Theirs is not an environment in which corruption can thrive; of course, it will raise its ugly heads from time to time and in some individual lives, but it can’t flourish. .

Compare that to the situation in Ghana. Here, corruption is considered “normal.” We think it okay if a man in an administrative position offers a job to someone he knows in preference to better qualified applicants. We think it normal if a president appoints the people closest to him to the most important ministerial positions, irrespective of their qualifications. We think it okay if a journalist who granted a favourable interview to an aspiring president becomes deputy minister of communication as soon as his man wins power.

Our politicians and leaders are corrupt, not because they want to be corrupt, but because they can’t help being corrupt. It is a trait ingrained in their character. They grew up in a corrupt society, and are naturally infected by its vibes.

T.S. might have had us in mind when he noted that, “the general ethos of the people they have to govern determines the behavior of politicians.”

Our politicians are corrupt because we live in a country in which more than 70% of the citizenry is corrupt. Ours is a nation in which corrupt acts are perpetrated every day in diverse aspects of our sociocultural living.

Our self-enslavement to the Western world too doesn’t help matters. After almost 60 years of independence, we still consume foreign goods in preference to local ones. We’ve brainwashed ourselves into thinking that what comes from the West is always better than what we can come up with ourselves, and this is always holding our local industries in check, limiting them.

We have over the years become so much reliant on Akwasi Broni—so much so that—things we can and should do for ourselves are left to his machinations. In short, we as a people lack belief and conviction in ourselves and our capabilities. We don’t believe that we can be self-reliant, and our leaders also don’t believe it. So, we don’t try changing things at all.

We have a ridiculously mediocre educational system in which more than 70% of students yearly fail their exams at the junior high school and senior high school levels, and then education ministers will come out saying that this years performance is far, far better than those of previous years. Of course, 34% passing is better than 30%, but what’s there to celebrate about that, when the pass percentage is likely to plunge to 21% next year?

You open a business centre and someone you know comes in expecting you to offer services or products at lesser charges than stipulated. Now, what happens if everybody who comes to do business with you is related to you in one way or another? And we even live in a society in which almost everybody is related to everybody else.

You board a car and watch as someone, after he had finish eating a figure of banana and groundnuts, throws out the rubbish onto the streets. You try admonishing him, and what happens? He will gleefully show you the middle figure and equally admonish you to “go-way-you-with-your-too-know!”

Here’s my drift—we live in a society where mediocrity is celebrated, ignorance glorified, and average considered synonymous with excellence. And until we change our thinking as a people, free ourselves from mental enslavement to the West, and make changes to our education system, we will forever remain a third world country, continually dependent on Akwasi Broni.

Singapore did it, and so can we. We should have started 50 years ago, but didn’t. The second best time to start is now. Let us, as individuals and as a nation, change our attitude to develop.