On the Run: It Is a Pity It Took So Long

I am here, of course, referring to the news article captioned “ ‘We’re Doing Things in 20 Months That We Have Not Done in 60 Years’ – Bawumia ‘Brags’” Modernghana.com 10/16/18). The Vice-President is reported to have made the remark that appears in the parenthetical caption of this column when he addressed participants of an association called the UK-Ghana Investment Summit on Tuesday, October 16, 2018. Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia was reported to have lamented the fact that in the 61 years of the reassertion of its sovereignty from British imperialism, Ghanaian leaders appear to have sat duck or idly by while massive developments in science and technology passed by them and their people.

For instance, the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana noted that it was only recently, under the tenure of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo that Ghanaian motorists began to have the chance of renewing their drivers’ licenses by directly accessing the Internet, rather than soliciting the paid services of middlemen and women for the same. What the foregoing means, of course, is that there is a great and progressive potentiality for the criminal act of bribery and corruption to be significantly reduced. But whether, indeed, these costly social vices can be significantly meliorated pretty much depends far less on the mere availability of the aforesaid technology but far more on the cultural mindset of the average Ghanaian citizen.

As of this writing, for the first time in the 26-year-old history of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, Ghanaians will be able to apply for passport forms and have their passports processed online. Quite predictably, already some Members of Parliament belonging to the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) are crying foul, on grounds that accessing cyber technology would discriminate against the rural poor and destitute who may not be able to readily access cyberspace. Now, such thinking is both inexcusably retarded and downright preposterous because most poor or low-income Ghanaian citizens have no need to acquire a passport in order to travel outside the country. They barely have enough to eat and cover their rent and medical expenses.

Then also, such thinking regresses the necessity for the country to be brought into the orbit of modern technology and civilization. It is also not true that rural community residents may not be able to access the preceding services because already any Ghanaian who owns or has access to the cell or mobile phone – and we are easily talking about more than half of the country’s population, is already using the Internet to effect such transactions as paying their phone bills and accessing their bank accounts. The pity here, though, is that contrary to what Vice-President Bawumia would have Ghanaians and the proverbial International Community believe, both leaders and politicians of the country’s two major parties, namely, the New Patriotic Party, at least under President John Agyekum-Kufuor, and the National Democratic Congress, under all of its three Fourth-Republican leaders, are equally guilty of cynically and unwisely holding back the clock of Ghana’s cultural and technological advancement.

But that it has fallen squarely onto the shoulders of Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia to bring Ghana up-to-speed or abreast of modern technological culture and civilization, only fortuitously affords these two most progressive Ghanaian leaders the prime opportunity to indelibly etch their proverbial footprints on Ghana’s political and economic historical sands for the foreseeable future. In other words, Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia may very well be fast on their way to establishing their enviable immortality in much the same way achieved by Drs. J. B. Danquah and K. A. Busia, and President Kwame Nkrumah and Mr. S. D. Dombo.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York
November 10, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]