PROMOS and BONANZAS!

Eiii! Ghana paa! Corporate organisations are now playing fast and loose with integrity! Fraudulent Promos and bonanzas have now become the profit generation scheme of choice for these “reputable time-tested firms”. And why not? We are a “religious nation” bereft of integrity! So it is pure “wisdom” and “ingenuity” to swim with the self-defeating tide of our collective irresponsibility and pedestrian immaturity. Clearly, corporate Ghana has gained the foresight, resourcefulness, and financial dexterity to cash in on the “gullibility” of the populace (customers and would-be-customers) who vainly believe these promos and bonanzas are in their best interest. Wantonly, we are been fleeced without a thought to safe-guarding our socioeconomic interactions.

Begging the question, one often wonders if Ghana’s myriad of economic woes is politically driven or an iron-cast manifestation of our lack of values? How else does one account for the cancerous canker of wanton irresponsibility and the absence of basic integrity in the socioeconomic interactions of corporate bodies and their teeming customers? Methinks it’s more of the later than the former – Y’know, a lack of values rather than a juvenile political will.

Foreign companies which do well (integrity-wise) and thus retain the loyalty of its customers, do not play by the same rules once they set up shop in Ghana. Why? The “Ghanaian factor” of playing fast and loose with integrity corrupts them! The result? Corporate Ghana has now become adept at the art of defrauding their customers on the trumped up scheme of promos and bonanzas – clearly defining the general populace as an assemblage of “suckers!”

Telecom companies are especially notorious for this. They spend a small fortune to advertise vigorously their “419” promos and bonanzas in the hope of reaping gargantuan fortunes. What was originally crafted as an avenue to engage in the “friendly” discharge of corporate-social responsibility has now become a vicious ploy to defraud loyal customers! With no intent of honoring their tall promises of dishing out four-wheel drives, an all-expenses paid trip to aborokyere(developed countries) and a host of others, customers are conned into gambling their fortunes away in vain hopes. Legal action to stymie this cancer could have been an option but for the dubious and dense “terms and conditions” that apply – wherein they cunningly exonerate themselves and free their consciences – if they ever had one – of any moral responsibility to stay true to their promises.

Is it any wonder then that the country teeters on the brink of economic ineptitude.

Our financial institutions have not been left out. To rope in the needed customer base, they tow the line of the telecoms, deceiving the populace into believing that opening an account may afford you the opportunity of stepping into your dreams.

But gradually, when the trust base has been eroded, and the suckers grown wiser, what then? Present Corporate Ghana would have effectively muddied the waters for start-ups that may have to tow that line of advertisement (with no intent to defraud). What this engenders is a stifling of economic growth and the exposure of the gaping sore that afflicts the national psyche. Sooner than, the average Ghanaian is wont to become “promotion and bonanza weary”.

While the telecoms and new generation banks are busy mortgaging the economic future of the country on fraudulent promo scheme platforms, I’m sure the selfsame are forever looking out for ways to increase their market share and profit margin. Talk about grotesque stupidity!

I am not a doomsday prophet but it doesn’t take much to foretell that very soon, with mobile money on the loose, it won’t be long before they rip customers off with some inventively executed master stroke of massive fraud on those platforms. And as always, the death of integrity would leave many stagnating in an economic quagmire from which a comeback may well prove impossible.

The recent fiasco of certain Micro-finance institutions who had keyed into this “killer” stratagem all too easily comes to mind.

Right now, confidence is waning, and unless restored by infusing integrity into the body politic of promos and bonanzas, we may soon become a pariah nation whose jaundiced sense of integrity is our greatest undoing. Sadly too, our jaundiced sense of integrity will become representative of who we are as a people. I shiver to think of the impression we’d be creating about ourselves in the global village that the world now is.

Ghanaians must awake now and challenge this debilitating trend on our socioeconomic landscape. Corporate Ghana must keep promises made – or not make them at all. Alternatively, the law must be made to score a fatal hit in the underbelly of all such promos and bonanzas. Failure to act, and act now is tantamount to playing the game of complacence that has seen many civilizations swept into the dustbin of oblivion. For us, it will be being swept into the dustbin of socioeconomic pariah nations.

We must loss our propensity and “giftedness” at playing “the saying game” while distancing ourselves from “the doing game.” We must come to the unblurred realization that it is “the doing game” that props up the pillars of socioeconomic growth, not the saying and not doing.

Telecoms and banks must henceforth live up to their promo and bonanza promises if we are to reverse this dangerous tide and rejuvenate our sense of pride as the first Black African nation to gain independence – in a struggle fought to prove that the black African can well manage his affairs. (I know what you’re thinking; currently we are not – but that’s exactly what this article is meant to address.) Corporate Ghana is manned by some of the best brains this nation has ever had the fortune to produce. Ironically though this creative genius is being trampled in the mud with the pervading culture of the absence of integrity.

I must add, briefly too that the absence of viable options is what is currently keeping Ghanaians tied to the apron strings of these scheming parasites. This, though, I can boldly say will not go on forever. Folks will get smarter and wiser and more sophisticated. Problem is, it may well plunge our nation into a dangerous socioeconomic nosedive. The symptoms are already budding. Soon, the disease will be full blown. Then we’ll go to prayer retreats to turn the tide while other nations pegging their existence in the solid foundation of integrity take giant leaps into progress and development.

Long live Ghana.