I recall the words of Kwame Nkrumah. “The black man is capable of managing his own affairs”. Today, the majority of Africans are doubting if what we have gone through to where we are is the “management” the old man had in mind. 

The worst example of our inability to manage our own affairs is the fact that we teach agriculture to university level yet import tomato, onion, maize, etc from Sahelian Burkina Faso and Niger, and our hotels import meat. We are, of all people, to be pitied.

To our eternal shame, filth is swallowing us. In our handling of filth, I wrote it on this page five years ago that Ghanaians are operating at a level below human existence.

Can anything, including extreme poverty, account for why we have allowed the frontage of the Makola and Kaneshie markets in Accra, the Takoradi Market Circle, Kejetia and Adum in Kumasi to hold such mountains of rubbish?

You cannot qualify to be listed among humans if you cook food for sale, or eat food cooked 10 metres away from a public toilet overflowing with excreta, plus maggots and all.

In Accra, the best (or is it, worst) example of our inhumanity and loss of government control is the stretch of petty traders from the railway crossing at Graphic Corporation. The latest development is now a loading point for some vehicles. I don’t need to be a prophet to foretell the consequences in lives lost and limbs broken.

Somehow, this will go “unseen” and unchecked because government is afraid to lose the next election. Couldn’t we, as President Kufuor did, create large walled spaces for them? That way, they will not be able to tell off the city guards with the excuse that they have nowhere else to display and sell their goods except by the roadside.

We have lost it; otherwise, how did we arrive at this point in our lives when traders are able to gang up together to resist government orders to relocate to allow for the construction of modern markets after a fire outbreak? Of course, they will cite instances in the past when stalls in the rebuilt markets went to wives of Ministers and city authorities, family and girlfriends.

I tell you, readers, we’ve lost it. Now let’s talk about the other side of our inhumanity.

I haven’t heard anybody claim that Western Europe and North America are corruption-free or that Americans or British, or Germans are unbribable. It is known, for example, that in the 1990s, SIEMENS, the German industrial giant, organised a global system of corruption to gain market share and increase its price. The corruption involved more than $1.4 billion in bribes to government officials in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas.

The collapse of Enron Corporation in 2001, which held more than $60 billion in assets, involved one of the biggest bankruptcy filings in the history of the United States. Corruption collapsed this U.S. energy, commodities and services company

The United Kingdom parliamentary expenses scandal was a major political scandal that emerged in 2009, concerning expense claims made by members of the British Parliament. The disclosure of widespread misuse of allowances and expenses permitted to members of Parliament (MPs) resulted in a large number of resignations, sackings, de-selections, and imprisonment.

So, I concede, corruption has no colour; but is that the excuse for this unbridled rape of Ghana’s economy by public office holders, some of whom look so saintly you’d list them among angels.

I used to think that the extortionate, unconscionably high, usurious rent accounted for why many of the high-rise apartments have remained vacant years after completion. Last week, Sam Jonah offered the right diagnosis: stolen or unexplained wealth.

Hear him: “Everywhere in the world, developers go to the bank to take loans for those developments. In a functioning, regulated market, the massive financial exposure from bank loans would force developers to immediately seek rental income.

“The current situation—where apartments sit vacant for months or even years—suggests that the money used to build them is not subject to financial accountability. Some of these apartments are all empty. Do you think that if money were collected from banks, banks would not have moved in?”

I am of the opinion that Ghana has hit the wall. And there is no hope for any country where the politician or ruling class does not know, or appreciate, that without agriculture and without science, technology and innovation, development or progress is impossible.

If for three years, since coming into power in 2022, Ibrahim Traore has refused to go to IMF for loan and has increased Burkina Faso’s GDP increased from US$18.82 (when he took power in 2022) to USD 21.86 billion in 2024 while improving in Good Governance ranking as 9th best governed country in Africa and 3rd in West Africa, then the message for Ghana is that the paradigm must shift.