DROP THAT YAM!

Many things make Ghana stand out of the many countries in this world. China, for instance, has earthquakes. Malaysia has missing flights. Ghana has dumsor! 

How we mention our independence with such pride! Yet… we all know how we are very much dependent today even more than the days we were under colonial rule. Dependence in independence! 

Have we ever learnt to live an independent life after close to six decades? Can the black man indeed manage his own affairs? I’ll say “yes” and “no”! 

Independence Day is such a pride to us. Yes, why not? But… fact is, what are we celebrating? Dependence? It stares us in the face each morning and here we are living under the delusion we are independent. Such deception!

Ghana at fifty-eight (58). A Ghanaian at (58). If a Ghanaian today is fifty-eight (58) years old and is living their life as Ghana is doing today, obviously such a Ghanaian won’t be enough a model for the young to learn from. He would be a cast away. 

He would own nothing on his own though he has every resource at his disposal to make it in life. He would be as poor as ever courtesy waste and mismanagement! It would be such a mystery why such a Ghanaian is poor despite all the abundance they’re surrounded with. Ghana’s poverty similarly amazes me!

If the maxim “life begins at 40” was anything to go by, Ghana’s life should have begun a long while ago. Unfortunately, it seems not to have yet. We still are trotting when the world is galloping. When the world is talking about solutions to problems, we keep on living in the problems despite their solutions!  

We pay our leaders to occupy positions and not to solve problems. We pay citizens for titles they’ve acquired for themselves and not for the problems they can solve. Our priorities are titles and big certificates not solutions… at fifty-eight (58)! 

It’s about time attention was focused on how we could solve what we have plagued ourselves into if we indeed don’t want Kwame Nkrumah to keep on turning in his grave. 

We have to drop that yam of mediocrity; yam of ill-confidence. We trade in foreign currencies right here in Ghana. Anything Ghanaian, in our estimation, is worse than their foreign counterpart (even our currency). We import everything except human beings. What a country! And… we are all comfortable. Drop that yam!

‘Dumsor’ is now a national disaster. No one knows exactly why we can barely have lights for ‘only’ 24 hours. Businesses are collapsing. Families are getting broken. Armed robbers and thieves are having a field day. Our leaders don’t give a hoot after all they can afford plants and generators. All of these are happening in a fifty-eight (58) old Ghana. Chai!

I don’t celebrate the length of the years of people; countries same. I instead celebrate the worth of their years! It’s not enough to be fifty-eight (58). Show me the worth of those years!  

Most of the ills we have brought upon ourselves were very avoidable. The little things we took for granted yesterday have become giants of problems today. Our nation is not growing any younger. 

The matter is not about comparing ourselves with other nations like Malaysia. No. It’s about comparing our today to our yesterday. If there’s not much difference between our today and yesterday, then obviously we are as stagnant as anything we can’t imagine. We are in competition today with our yesterday. Forward ever, backward never! However, we have chosen to stay still.

Our nation (not our politicians) is all we have. It’s either we make that conscious effort to build it to be the world’s destination or we perish with it. ‘Dumsor’ will affect you as long as you’re in this nation. Bad roads will affect all of us. 

Whatever ill that comes to mind when you think of Ghana would eventually affect you and me… so the earlier we solved them, the better it would be for us. 

We have only one legacy to hand over to posterity; a better Ghana (not the politically-driven one). A Ghana that won’t be battling challenges their ancestors should have solved. A Ghana that would be thriving on a problem-based education so solutions could be provided, not a Ghana which is almost always divided by politics! 

Ghana at fifty-eight (58)? I only shake my head. I want to celebrate Ghana at maybe a worthwhile sixty (60) or beyond. It might only be another dream if we all won’t drop our yams… a yam of no patriotism; a yam of corruption; a yam of mismanagement; a yam of you; a yam of me!