L E TTE R F ROM ABROAD

Letter from Ghana

Nana Akua Anyidoho

Power cut? All the better to see the fireworks...

GHANA celebrated 50 years of independence on March 6th. As a gift to the nation, the state electricity company promised an outage-free anniversary. Immediately after the fireworks, the country was returned to rationed darkness. Happy Birthday to us. Ghanaians argued over whether we shouldn’t spend the anniversary mourning the squandered promises of that heady midnight in 1957 when Ghana became the first sub-Saharan country to gain independence from colonial rule. The pessimists reached easily for the fact that we cannot even generate enough power to keep our lights on, much less our industries going. But Ghanaians are not a people to don black on a national birthday, and so we draped ourselves and the country in red, gold and green. In the headiness of the celebrations, we prefaced just about everything with ‘Ghana@50’: there were Ghana@50 concerts and prayer meetings, Ghana@50 bottled drinks and gum. I never got round to buying those anniversary t-shirts that made the statement in colourful type, but I am proud to be Ghanaian, and I think that to say we have not achieved anything in our young history of statehood is to paint a picture of unwarranted gloom. In the past year alone, Ghana has been handed presidency of the Africa Union, welcomed Kofi Annan home relatively unscathed from his term at the UN, and achieved a historic 4-1 drubbing of arch-rivals Nigeria in a football friendly, a fitting epilogue to our World Cup 2006 feats. While we are far from recapturing our per capita income circa independence, the country has had to contend with three decades of alternating civilian and military regimes, as well as the economic crisis of the 1980s. We climbed out of that financial hole with resilience, and resolutely closed the chapter on military rule. And the nation remains a picture of stability in a neighbourhood disturbed by conflict. “But”, the answer comes back, “the negative achievement of avoiding war is nothing to boast of”. True, although if things are as bad as the naysayers tell us, there’s no way to go but up! “Ah”, a friend replied, “but some countries hit rock bottom –and start drilling”. “That won’t be Ghana’s fate”, I assured her. “We don’t have the equipment, or the power to run it...” Our president, who has made a virtue out of being ‘boring’ –as he pointed out in a BBC interview, ‘boring’ means that we

Nana Akua Anyidoho is a researcher at the University of Ghana.

stay out of the eye of a global media overeager to paint Africa ‘black’ with famine-war-and-disease – gave the most uninspired anniversary pep-talk, asking his country-people to move ahead ‘systematically’ to build a better Ghana. Not a speech to go down in history, but a sensible prescription...if we could figure out what it meant. Policy scholar Stephen Ball observes that “policy making is inevitably a process of bricolage: a matter of borrowing and copying bits and pieces of ideas from elsewhere...and not infrequently flailing around for anything at all that looks as though it might work”. Ghana has taken this truth and run with it. At 50, we still haven’t figured out what we want to be when we grow up, but for now, the country has decided that what it really wants is to hang with the cool kids and their fashionable labels: we submitted SAP, were eager to join NEPAD, blithely ‘went HiPIC’, and were happy that the US found us worthy of a piece of MCA pie. Our uneven progress as a nation can be put down, in part, to our extreme susceptibility to any wind of change in development doctrine or funding conditionality. This from the country which bore the visionary leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, and one recognized as a key political and economic pacesetter on the continent. We have sold our birthright for potage. And so we grapple with the same problems over and over: the energy woes that have plagued us for decades (even though the nation has a hydroelectric dam on a man-made lake that was once the largest in the world). Or the inflation we thought we had hammered down to a single-digit number but which popped irrepressibly back up in May. Not to mention the regular labour strikes or the exponential increases in the price of petrol in the past few years. Yes, we have much to celebrate – let’s close that debate. Now we need to chart a new course for the next 50 years. But if our leaders don’t know where we are going, how are we supposed to get there – systematically or otherwise? Let’s hope someone finds the light switch soon.