Ours is a give-away motherland. Some compatriots regret that. We cede to others everything that has the potential to lift us from low to high to deepen their prosperity while we continue to wallow in mediocrity. I thought the latest was PDS. Prior to that, there was Aqua Vitens. In our unusual rumour mongering, the airport was also said to have gone. It shouldn’t; nothing of ours should go to anyone else but us.
We
are experts in rumour mongering. Rumours dogged the colonial government making
governors so happy. The one-way radio they introduced would keep mischief
makers off air. Kwame Nkrumah did a whole dawn broadcast on it. NLC decreed in
futility against it only to retract the decree-no-work. Blaa Kutu made his own
attempt and failed to halt it.
Shamefully, it is rife on radio when we should have shamed the
colonialist by demonstrating that you can have a two-way radio without vile
rumour contents.
Our
give-away habit began the moment Don Diego d’Azambuja and Kwamena Ansa met in
the Edina trade negotiation. See, we gave away Edina and adopted Elmina which
the Portuguese concocted right before our eyes on our own soil. They didn’t
have to take that away to refine and export to us. Accra for Ga, Winneba for Simpa,
Apam for Apaa, Mumford for Dwama, Saltpond for Akyemfo, Cape Coast for Oguaa – all
littered along our littoral stretch. We would give anything we have away
unprocessed and that continued seven good centuries on.
You
see, once a top official of one of our state-owned concerns told me point blank
that they had heard government was negotiating with a foreign concern to take
over management of their organization. As workers, they had resolved it would
not happen and that if it happened, they would ensure the foreign entity would
not succeed in providing the efficient services expected of it. Good gracious!
I exclaimed. I know of no nation that has succeeded with that Konongo Kaya; we
won’t do any good and we won’t allow anyone else to do any good. Konongo Kaya; look
there, not ‘abrɔ ne bayie’. I have never heard abayifoɔ
making noise to kill people slowly. Yet that is what the God-knowing prayer
warriors are doing all over the motherland.
We
know the worth of everything we give to others to prosper. We seem not to care
about the consequences of the give-away as something that would come back to us
at a higher price. I think much of it is that stupidity of selfishness. That
‘emi meenya me dokon; so let everyone else go hungry, I couldn’t care less’
attitude. We do not use what we own to help ourselves. We have to give it to
someone else to come and TEACH us how to use it at a price that is always a
loss to us.
Sometimes,
one wonders if we haven’t handed over the power generated in our learning and
research centres to foreigners. Research and development drive development.
Somehow, we seem to have completely separated the two. So we research and
discover information that should inform and contribute to our development. At
the same time, we have consciously or unconsciously drawn a thick line of
divide between the two just to make sure they don’t intersect like they do in
other places to push development.
I
keep asking myself whether this will ever stop or change. As I watched some
schoolchildren walk by yesterday, driving by, I felt pity for them because many
have to walk long distances to school like I did in 1957. No buses for
schoolchildren. The uniform they were wearing ought to have been manufactured
elsewhere like the thread that would be used to sew it. I revoltingly disagree
with appointing a foreign president before we can take the leap of destiny that
has so far eluded us. We must make things work with our own people; we can and
we should.
Managers
don’t go bankrupt when they ‘bankrupt’ state institutions. Office holders must
be made responsible by holding them accountable. Personal wealth of officials
who collapse state ventures don’t get probed. A national airline project has
come and gone times over. Nobody involved has been investigated for their
personal wealth.
Why not a rosewood processing factory (1rF = one rosewood factory) if we really want to chop those precious trees for export. There’s been no lesson from the sale of hard wood in the mid1980s. I first saw cinnamon plant and its nice smell growing on the college arboretum in the 1960s. Others are processed into powder on supermarket shelves and we are still importing Grenada while we are still exporting raw ‘sro’ and ‘fam wisa’ along with ‘hwenteaa.’ We are so annoyingly proud of exporting non-traditional UNPROCESSED export!
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh
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