Moving from surviving to thriving

Whether we are on the brink of being declared highly indebted or not; whether we are teetering on the edge with regard to our educational sector or not; whether we are losing the fight against corruption or not; whether we are continually running in circles without making progress or not, one thing is clear. 

And it is that we are barely surviving; eking out a living and living at a bare minimum.

There isn’t enough electricity around to be extravagant with. There isn’t enough cash in the pockets of many to keep the local economy moving.

There sure isn’t enough goodwill towards the political establishment. And there isn’t much to be said regarding the spate of corruption that has engulfed and continues to undermine whatever it is that we can achieve collectively.

For us, bribery and corruption is part of our daily existence. It might be clothed and hidden beneath so many veils, but the fact still remains that it is something we see daily.

For every tale of inefficiency and maladministration, there are several tales of the payment of money to one individual or the other just to keep things going.

Former President Kufuor might have been right after all when he stated that corruption is as old as Adam. It indeed is.

Every Ghanaian has a tale of corruption. In one of KSM’s early stage productions entitled “The Saga of the Returnee”, the story is told of how a returnee from a system that is more efficient and well developed confronts the inefficiencies and weaknesses in his home country. 

As the story goes, a police officer stops the returnee for a bribe. The returnee insists on his right not to pay the bribe.

The police officer simply asks the returnee to pull over and wait on the sidelines. The returnee watches on helplessly, as others comply by paying the bribe.

Within academic circles, intellectuals can’t agree on what exactly are the ills plaguing our society- with corruption being a quintessential example.

This is not made any easier by the fact that the customs, traditions and religious orientations that we hold dear may sometimes blur the lines.

When is a gift simply a gift? When is a gift a bribe? What if one argues that money or gifts are given as part of religious observances?
After all, God does love the cheerful giver.

The challenge with the survival syndrome is that we stop looking for solutions and rather find ways of adjusting and living with things as they are.

Probably, we understand this phrase best: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” We’ve learnt to live with the perennial floods that wreck havoc by taking away lives and destroying property.

We have learnt to live with the power situation. And up to this point, I still insist that no one has been able to stick his or her neck out with either an innovation or something in the nature of an innovation as an antidote to the power situation- even if it is not on an industrial scale.

For all the science education that we’ve had in this country; for all the years of teaching physics and other related areas, for all the years that the nation’s universities have been churning out graduates from the sciences, we seem not to have found it necessary to find a cure to the challenges that confront us.

So in the case of corruption, we have failed to find a way of dealing with it. The recent investigation into supposed judicial corruption does not come as a surprise to many simply because it is a nationwide phenomenon.

We live it. We breathe it. We coin interesting names and descriptions for it. Our intellectuals conceptualise the issue to the point where it no longer makes sense.

I have heard someone make a case for corruption, asserting that it has advantages. My view: There is nothing advantageous about taking resources of the state and appropriating it at will or accepting money to fix something that one is entitled to do anyway.

If we desire to not merely survive but thrive, then we must do things a whole lot differently. We must begin to appreciate the impact of our individual unilateral actions on the wealth and well being of the state.

We must remember that we owe it to the next generation to make Ghana a better place. This requires being futuristic and considering the overall impact of our daily actions on the future generation.

The palpable absence of political role models is something that is bound to kill the soul of the nation. It looks as though we are all locked up in survival mode. But this must change.

We need more local heroes. Our textbooks must be able to teach and speak of us as a nation of doers and darers. And that is not beyond us.