Monday, June 22, 2009

The Augean Stables can and will be cleaned

Yesterday I read two articles and found them very interesting, all the more so since they were about the same small and seemingly un-newsworthy district of Bongo, abutting Burkina Faso, in the Upper East Region, itself the last but one region of Ghana both in terms of size and of population.

The first article to catch my attention explained how the local Directorate of Education took the bold step of striking against those teachers who disgrace their job by resorting to absenteeism, lateness and drunkenness during school hours. The sanctions apportioned included suspended salaries and demotions.

Another article also dated Sunday, 21 June 2009 focussed on communal labour and how the Presiding Member of the Bongo District Assembly intended to make people's participation in communal labour mandatory and again, apportion sanctions for those who wouldn't do their share for the common good of the society.

If the first initiative has already had practical results, with 24 teachers already found lacking and sanctioned accordingly, the second one seems to be still a project.

The fact that officials in this far away (from the capital) district of one of the northernmost regions of Ghana decide to make these bold steps almost at the same time renewed my belief that the moment has not come yet and never will come to throw in the towel.

Corruption, lack of morals, and lack of civic-mindedness are widespread human flaws, which does not mean they should be accepted and left to flourish. Quite the contrary.

That Mr. Francis Agyeere, District Director of Education, in the first case, and Mr. Emmanuel Nsoh Atindana, Presiding Member of the Bongo District Assembly, in the latter case, have taken such bold steps to clean their local version of the Augean Stables is highly commendable. That each of them, in his own area of responsibility, decided to tackle the seemingly formidable task before them is extremely encouraging. These two gentlemen and, I believe, a lot of others, love their country, are dedicated to making it the best within their means and areas of resoponsibility, and started acting upon the vision they had of how the situation should be and will be, if tackled in an appropriate and efficient manner.

Despite the many valuable heads of cattle we keep there, we left our stables get so filthy that a lot of fainter-hearted people than Heracles will abandon the idea of cleaning them as impossible. That's what we all do when we decide that despite the many fine people inhabiting our country, we -each one of us being a steward of the common property- neglect it for so long that the ills and rots of corruption, laziness, lack of morals and of civism creep in and pile up so high that we would rather sit and weep on our wasted riches than tackle the task of cleaning and buffing and shining it anew.

Please read or re-read the story of the Augean Stables and how Heracles cleaned them,

not only using his great strength, but using his brain to plan this challenge.
Please think about our own Augean Stables, start planning how you can clean them, put the plans into practice, and persevere.

Like the mythical Heracles, we can and, with perseverance, ambition and foresight, we will clean our stables of the muck and turn stinking waste into a fertilizer for all the surrounding fields.

Monday, June 15, 2009

The way forward: believe

For the few decades since I started scrutinizing the way Africa and, notably, Ghana, has been doing in terms of development, one thing struck me repeatedly: a substantial share of the people, from all walks of life, rich, poor, educated, uneducated, urban or rural, don't really seem to believe their continent, their country or themselves can achieve anything close to Western success. A few of them profess they don't want Western-style development, but most acknowledge their yearning for the kind of comforts it gives. Yet, most of them seem to find normal that Africa should be persistently lagging behind all the other continents in terms of basic needs like food, health, and education.

Henry Ford is said to have coined the sentence:

"Whether you believe you can or you can't, you're right."

Let's give it a little thought: how can we really expect to achieve anything, small or big, if we don't believe we will? Doesn't it make perfect sense that the first step to any achievement is how much we believe we will achieve it?

Take the Roman Empire. Yea, right, that was long ago, and only touched the Mediterranean fringe of our continent. Yet, around two thousand years ago, this city-state had visionary leaders, individuals who believed what they couldn't see, who had a vision so compelling that they actually moved thousands of people (and mountains) to make their vision come true. They built bridges on such mighty rivers as the Rhine. Stone-covered roads, laid on proper foundations, ran to every corner of the empire, allowing trade to prosper (and taxes to be generated). Where human settlements needed more water than the local resources supplied, they built channels to carry water from elsewhere to where it was required. Emperor Claudius even had a tunnel built through the hills to carry water from a lake into Rome. Sometimes though a valley could lie in between the place from where the water came and where it needed to go. Here the Romans simply constructed bridges for the channel to cross the valley: these were named aqueducts and can still be seen today.

What was possible around two millennia ago certainly should be much more easily achievable today. Reading about the bridges Julius Caesar built in 10 days for the first, "a few days" for the second, on the river Rhine in 55 and 53 BC respectively, I cannot help thinking about remote areas like our Ghanaian Afram Plains, however aptly dubbed "the food basket of the country", for example, where teachers refuse to go because the district is only accessible by canoe; where people die en route to the nearest hospital (by canoe too); where helpless farmers lose the most fertile lands they've been farming for generations to foreign investors and are made to abandon farm work in mid season because of the uncertainty on whether whatever is grown there still does belong to them or to the foreign investor.

What did the Romans have, two millennia back, that we don't have today?

  • They had skilled and ingenious engineers. So do we. The Ghanaian universities are considered among the best in West Africa; American students travel to Ghana for their year abroad programme; Ghanaian students attend universities everywhere in the world and learn about state of the art techniques and technologies.
  • They had cheap manpower. Ghana has a lot of unemployed and underemployed youth. Hands are plenty. Lots of them lack direction, leadership, a civic mind, and dedication to a task the achievement of which they could proudly claim to have contributed to. With proper channelling of all these youthful energies, there is little that cannot be achieved in the interest of the nation.
  • They had enormous willpower, driven by extraordinarily influential leaders, so compelling it trickled down to the confines of the empire, to the most remote military, administrative and tax outposts and officers (by the way, yes, they had taxes: a steady supply of money that kept increasing the more they made every region of the empire accessible and able to trade; feeding and funding more infrastructure works).

Leaders. Visionaries. Far-seeing people, who believe their vision is achievable if only they put their minds to it.

Of the whole array of assets the Romans had, the lack of visionaries seems to be the one obstacle hindering Ghana's progress. What we have, mostly, is rulers; stewards, at best; but leaders and visionaries are yet to emerge.

Visions are what electoral promises should be made of. Once a government is voted in, some of these promises tend to fade off and get conveniently forgotten, swept under the rug, even retracted. In the name of "realism", we tend to accept quite easily that promises are routinely broken, that what looked like blindingly bright visions during the campaigns was only wool being pulled over the eyes of the voters, and that few of the promises which led people to vote for a candidate will ever materialise. What it proves is that we, the citizens, as well as the would-be leaders, never truly believed in what we were promised or promising.

We, the citizens, but also the people "at the top", need non-partisan, impartial log-keepers of the government's programme and achievements. This post is published today on www.promisestoghana.com, which, in essence, is such a logbook. I can only commend the excellent initiative, the admirable dedication, and the huge work behind this website. Long life to it, and thanks for making this wonderful tool available to us.