Bridging Ghana’s yawning productivity gap

A major cause of our seemingly intractable economic problems is that we are lazy.  The naked truth is that we just do not like hard work.  We like the good life but forget that it has to be paid for.  

Like the folk character “Kweku Ananse”, we think that somebody else should work so that we can relax and enjoy the fruits of that labour, fair or foul.  Unfortunately such behaviour catches up with you sooner or later, and for us Ghanaians, it has caught up with us and there is no escaping the punishment.

Productivity figures 

To give us an idea of how low we have sunk as a result of our refusal to work, below are some productivity figures comparing us with two of our contemporaries at independence: Malaysia and South Korea.  The numbers are Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures per capita in US dollars as reported by the World Bank.  The GDP per capita is the value of all goods and services produced in a country divided by the population.

The figures above speak for themselves.  In 1970,we were ahead of both Malaysia and South Korea.  In fact,South Korea’s productivity was only about half of Ghana’s.  

Twenty years later in 1990, Malaysia had grown their GDP six-fold and South Korea had grown theirs a whopping 22-fold.  In Ghana,our GDP per capita increase was not even up to half of the 1970 figure. 

Forty-three years later in 2013, the GDP numbers of both Malaysia and South Korea were so large that they had achieved developed country status.  In Ghana, our GDP numbers are still so low that we are wallowing in a dubious classification of lower middle income status despite our oil find.  It is also sobering to note that compared to Ghana, South Korea, the biggest mover, has no natural resources to speak of.  Their achievements have resulted largely from shrewd leadership and the hard work and dedication of its people.

Hard work 

For us in Ghana, hard work is anathema.  We would prefer to party 24 hours a day and expect to be paid a handsome salary.  Public servants have demanded and obtained huge increases in their remuneration through the Single Spine Salary Structure implementation but have refused to lift a finger in response by way of increased productivity.  

Their refusal to help generate the money used to pay them has resulted in what we are experiencing today; spiraling inflation and descent into the vicious poverty cycle.

That is not to say that only public servants are lazy.  Our population as a whole has a negative attitude towards work.  There are strong young men and women roaming our streets wiping windscreens and selling all manner of crap when there is abundant opportunity for them to work seriously. I always like to use our rice imports as an example because it is a classic case.  

It is totally unacceptable for us to spend nearly five hundred million dollars ($500m) to import perfumed rice annually to eat when our land is fertile and idle.  It is difficult for me to accept that unemployment is a problem when such gaping opportunities exist.  

Anybody who seriously wants to work would see the rice situation as a $500 million opportunity to get on the land. 

Attitude to work

Good attitude to work is one of the nine basic life principles that we as a people have failed to practise, resulting in our predicament.  I have named those principles many times in my articles but I would wish to remind readers again. 

They are: ethics, integrity, responsibility, respect for laws and rules, respect for the rights of other citizens, good attitude to work, punctuality, good savings and investment culture, and will of super action.  Anyone who understands these principles and is familiar with Ghanaians knows that we have “bombed” in each and every one of them.  Failure is an understatement.

To add insult to injury, we demand free or subsidised services from our government:  electricity, water, education, health,etc. If we refuse to work to support the provision of these services, is it surprising that they would be free but not available? 

We want electricity in our homes to play music and watch television while denying what is left of our industry productive use of the resource.  What kind of economics are we practising? 

Refuge in education

In order to mask our laziness, we have sought refuge in education.  It is now the fashion to acquire as many qualifications as possible no matter the subject.  The idea is to sit in an air-conditioned office and be paid a huge salary just for possessing chains of degrees. Unfortunately, as many of us find out, the chains of qualifications get us nowhere and we now have an un-employed graduates association. The only people profiting are those operating all manner of universities with dubious curricula.  Meanwhile, we have a shortage of good artisans.  I am in the construction business and I know that good carpenters, masons, electricians, tilers, gardeners,etc are hard to find because air condition is not included in the job description.  We have not learnt the simple principles of life.  There is no escaping hard work if we want to see lasting prosperity in our lives.

Solving  productivity puzzle

Solving the productivity problem requires the adoption of a productivity-based reward system.  Qualifications must be secondary to a person’s ability to deliver on the job.  I remember that when the Americans were still running VALCO, there was a Department Manager whose only qualification was a Middle School Leaving Certificate.  

The reason he headed the department was  that his ability to deliver on the job was not in question.  In the Ghanaian system, this fellow would probably have remained a labourer all his life under some lazy fellow with chains of qualifications.  

Qualifications are good inasmuch as they assist in a person’s ability to perform.  They are not an end in themselves.

The writer is an engineer and his 

E-mail: norbenne1@yahoo.com