The Government Dependency Syndrome

As a young boy, I learned the power of collective effort. As boys we will get into groups to work in turns on each other’s farm. It was an initiative that someone might think is the same as working on your own farm the number of days equal to the number of people in the group. But if one could work that much then what was the purpose of having the group anyway? The logical answer is that it is not that simple working alone on your farm that much as compared to working together as a group. It was most times daunting going to the farm alone. Then when you get there the quietude of the fields and the imposing posture of the elephant grass scares you. You are not able to work that long and that much and you quickly return home when the sun begun to unleash its venom.

But working in groups is something special and inspirational. It is as if you do not get tired. It is competitive whether you are working on your own farm or others. The presence of your friends next to you bent over with their hoes in hand mauling shrub and grass on their way pushed you to do same. Moreover, some colleagues would go the extra mile and work more than the average making you do same for them. The chitchats, gossips, teases and the mimics made the sun passed away without noticing its venom. In a group we were able to accomplish more than as individuals. After all we were taught that unity is strength. A broom sweeps better than a broom stick.

So I learned that it takes much more and many days for an individual to achieve something that will take fewer days in a group. I got to know that as a group we could achieve much. And in those days the spirit of communalism was widespread and strong among the people in our community. I remember when the first junior high school block was built; it was not the government that did it. Community members contributed money and volunteered their time and skills to erect the structure in which I had my junior secondary school education. During what is called communal labour, community members gather to clean gutters and weed their surroundings to keep the community clean.

And back then there was a government. People did not wait for the government to come clean their communities for them. People did not wait for the government to come and lay the foundation for a school or a clinic or a toilet facility for them. They started all on their own and if they are lucky the government comes to complete the rest.

So what went wrong? Why all of a sudden each one of us has developed cold feet towards what concerns all of us? We have become more talkers than doers while in the past we talked less and did more. We are now looking more to the government to solve all our problems for us including sweeping our homes and cleaning our gutters whiles in the past we took those initiatives ourselves.

Imagine in a number of communities in Ghana pupils have no classrooms but study under trees. Imagine they do not have tables and chairs but to sit on the floor to study. But in the same communities we have wood that is being cut illegally, sold and exported outside this country. And the people responsible for these illegal activities are the ones we entrust with the responsibility of ensuring that the children have good education. They connive with the chiefs and some members of the communities to log these woods and ship them outside while their children sit on the floor. When all it takes is just cutting some of these woods and with the help of the carpenters in the community they could have made a table and chair at a time for their children to sit on. But we still wait for government. Is it not also possible to erect classrooms for our children if government is not coming to do it? Especially in remote areas of this country where most of the houses are built with mud and roofed with thatch, all it takes is just a few days of communal labour and that will be done.

We have also depended on cutlass and hoe for so long that in this modern era, while it takes less than 5% of some countries population to produce food to feed the whole country, the more than 60% of the population engaged in farming cannot feed us. It is a shame that it is the older population who still engage in farming while every young person is either looking for a government job or leaves the village for the city. Farming is typically unattractive because it still involves the use of the old ways of doing it. How much will it take for communities to own their own farm equipments like tractors, harvesters, harrowers and planters? I know in our country some areas are noted for growing certain crops. Is it not possible to identify these areas and provide farm machinery for the farmers in these communities, constitute them into groups to own large farm lands? Except for vegetables and fruits storage should not be a problem, since our farmers have age old methods of storing their produce. These methods can be improved upon. The farmers could have a strong collective bargaining power through this process ensuring that they get value for their produce.

What happened to the native doctors in our remote communities? The traditional midwives? These people could be at the forefront of saving lives. What they need is a little training. We cannot abandon absolutely everything we have. In our villages we still eat yam and cassava, pound fufu with pestle and mortar and still cook yakayake in clay pots. Nothing prevents us from doing what has worked in the past. Just a little training and improvement our lives could become much better and we could meet the millennium development goals. Just in the case of building a community school through communal labour we can build a community health post.  Even if we cannot get medical doctors and nurses to work there we can have our own trained native doctors and traditional midwives working to save lives.

There is no reason where people should still drink water from streams. Is it not allowed anymore to dig wells? All the wells that I used when I was growing up were dug by members of my community. Communities could provide their own good drinking water. It is true good underground water is not something that can be found everywhere. However, there is no harm in trying to find good water so that people can live healthily

Somehow many of our problems can be solved without necessarily waiting for government. All it takes is mobilizing ourselves as members of a community and committing ourselves to a purpose and project. Government has a responsibility to provide every community with basic social amenities like schools, health post and water. My point here is not to absolve government of that responsibility. The thing is that we as communities have a lot of resources at our disposal and instead of misusing these resources it is better to use it for the benefit of our communities.

Maybe we have just become more individualistic, selfish and corrupt. There is nothing anymore like ‘we are each other’s keeper’. Just like our government which depends on outside support while misapplying those donor funds and exploiting the nation’s resources for selfish gains we too have become government dependent. Can we break these chains that enslave our minds and hands from using what is ours to solve our own problems?

I think that just like when we were kids we worked in groups to help each other on our farms, we can do the same to help our communities. The time to start is now. Let a new generations of Ghanaians develops a sense of belongingness and put the group, community and nation interest before individual ones.

The Cause of Ghana’s Middle Class

All societies have in one way or the other created social classes consciously or unconsciously.  The Indian caste system is an example of a consciously created social class system based on religious beliefs that have persisted till today. The aristocracy and commoners is a class system created in the middle ages based along political and economic lines. Even in our African societies there were class systems. Class systems are an inherent part of every society. It is there even though it is not acknowledged most times. Even when Marx envisaged a classless society, that never happened in communist Soviet Union and China.

History has taught us that class revolt occurs when there is a wide economic inequality between the haves and have-nots; when the aristocrats flaunt their wealth while the common herd wallows in abject poverty.  In other cases class conflict is deepened by the absolute suppression of one class by the other denying the victim the dignity of being a human being. The Arab Spring is a modern example of this.

However, in most cases the common herd lacks the initiative to undertake a class rebellion until a savior comes around; an enigmatic individual who is more aware of the circumstances of the suffering masses than they the masses themselves. Albeit sometimes for his own selfish pursuits, he becomes a hero in the eyes of the masses because he identifies himself with the common people. In the 1980s, this phenomenon swept across the African country with the emergence of leaders like J.J. Rawlings and Thomas Sankara.

The painful truth is that we cannot all be ‘equal’. But this does not mean while some people have others should not have. Every human being has the right to be treated with dignity and must have access to the basic needs of life: food, shelter, cloth, health and education. And in all organized societies it is the responsibility of the rulers to provide the conditions, the enabling environment for every citizen to have access to all of these. The failure of any government to harness the resources under their disposal for the provision of basic needs to her citizens so that they can also live in dignity is a crime to which these governments must be held accountable.

Moreover it is worse when the rulers live in glass houses, drive expensive cars, drink fine wine and eat good food while their citizen roam about scraping for a living. Such leaders are unwise. Thomas More in his Utopia argued that it is better a leader is poorer than the lead.

So it is alright if the citizenry once in a while demands responsible governance from the leaders of their country. It is the collective responsibility of all of us to talk about the ills of government. Because such ills cost us much more than the bailouts and handouts we receive from our colonial masters and development partners.

The emergence of a middle class purporting to demand a better Ghana from the government, an agenda that brought the government to power in the first place, should be commended and signal the government that certain things are not working well. The derision and contempt expressed by government officials towards the actions of this group spells amateurism.  It underscores the apparent lack of discipline that characterize the actions and utterance of some government officials without regard to retrospection.  This form of exuberance to please a higher power without thought to what is expedient is one of our problems in leadership.

But to what end? To what end will the sycophancy bring the rest of us? The crowding of critical minds by a small minority of the population can be a boiling point for revolt. Again the Arab spring should be a lesson. People should be allowed to express their anger and frustration the constitutional way provided by the constitution. It is an outlet to diffuse pain and anger. But this also does not mean we should engage in wanton disrespect for authority with insults. It is not an African value to insult elders.

However, the momentum of this group in articulating the course of the have-nots has died down. One reason for this could be the label; middle class they gave themselves.  In fact listening to the reasons some of them stated in going on the first demonstration one can construe that if their personal circumstances change they will be become oblivious to the plight of the majority.

By labeling themselves as middle class they alienate themselves from the majority of the people who are really feeling the brunt of the economic conditions. The middle class is just a small fraction of the populace just like the ruling class. Their needs do not supersede the needs of others. Though one will acknowledge that their success will have a ripple effect on the rest of the populace it is a fact also that our political elite today were also once middle class. One is skeptical to identify himself with them because their label is seen as a means to make transition to the political elite of this country. When they get there then they will close their ears to the incessant cries of the struggling majority because they are now satisfied and have opportunity to amass wealth for themselves. This is evident everywhere, both in government and in the opposition parties.

So though we are all not equal we need to fight to have what everyone else deserves. But in my opinion it is wrong to think that fight belongs to a particular class. That creates division and apathy in the majority and a recipe for the ruling class to interpret our actions as political no matter how hard we try to alienate ourselves from any political party.

These are my personal views and should not be attributed to anyone or group.