Not into the pages of the Ghana Law Reports edited by Dr. Bimpong-Buta, who was done in by some legal ‘miscreants’ would such a title ever go. TONA vs. MALT would never be cited by the legion of law hopefuls whose chances of gaining entry into the Ghana Law School continue to dwindle like the value of stocks on the Ghana Stock Exchange. My Chevening Scholarship brothers, Joe Aboagye Debrah, Moses Foh-Amoaning before him or Alex Quainoo would never have cause to eject a client from financial and legal trouble by quoting copiously from any legal authority in the guise of TONA vs. MALT for that in all certainty is not the title of a case within either the Common Law System or the Romano-Germanic Law alternative spawned by none other than the ubiquitous Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France. TONA vs. MALT is indeed an observation, one that has been made over the years and tells us something of what we as a people are and where we are going within the TONA syndrome vis-à-vis what the world thinks of us as a people and where we are supposed to be within the context of a MALT syndrome. I shall return to these issues presently.
I have a humble appreciation of the Japanese. They have done what many a war-ravaged country has been unable to do over the years after suffering the unleashing of high-powered thermobaric devices on their land. They did this by veering away from TONA and adhering rigorously to MALT without any excuse-giving attitudes. TONA unfortunately has become the favourite pastime of Ghanaians, irrespective of what strata of the Ghanaian establishment we belong to for we love to talk, and talk we spend all our time doing while the whole world waves us goodbye on their way to real growth and development at the same time that we are enjoying marking time firmly attached to the degenerative principles of political opponent destruction and clueless pontification on all issues whether or not they fall within our domain or professional competence. TONA is also responsible for the pathetic invocation of names of this or that person, as if the invocation of these names can put a square meal on the table of the people that Kofi Wayo has started complaining about again and rather too early in the administration of his new found friends, or that flaunting our proximity to those names would make the International Community fall in line and pour investments into Ghana because we are the so-called smooth talkers of the sub-region, hospitable in all our behaviours and the best educated minds of this century. O! TONA has made us too self-righteous that we have actually made an industry out of it, an industry that produces outcomes that do not profit or benefit its shareholders. Should we continue to promote the TONA syndrome?
Symptoms of TONA
It might be proper to deconstruct TONA, defined by the Japanese as the Talk Only No Action syndrome. When I first came across the categorization in a dispatch, I found it insultingly nauseating, for my national and individual pride would not have me accept this reality on the spur of the moment. However after careful thought, I realized the truth in that statement. We are a patently talk only no action group of people, who bask in the fruitlessness of a useless attachment to semantic pontification on issues simply because they have been raised to elicit discussion. The godfathers of TONA syndrome are those who love to call others serial callers but are quickly affronted by references to themselves as serial talkers. Whether by accident or deliberate design, these people have arrogated to themselves the right to have the final say on any matter, whether it is about the mating habits of amphibious amphibians or the fuselage design of a K8 jetfighter in low level tactical maneuvering formation, TONA moguls are bombarding our eardrums with their self-righteous cacophonous decibels of mundane ignorance couched in fine lingua to make the uninitiated populist, popularize and exalt ignorance to strange levels. Is ours not a sorry lot?
Compare that to the nephews of MALT syndrome, crawling over the face of the earth with a marked and resolute resolution to traverse the boundaries of self-imposed limitations fostered by the effects of TONA and which they realized very early as the precise incubator for the process and preference that engender degenerate behaviour and national interest undermining. MALT syndrome adherents demonstrate by their actions that TONA syndrome moguls do well to state that debate is good for society and that debate brings out the best as it encourages competition and yet, when given the opportunity to practicalize the results of those debates, that becomes precisely the point that TONA takes over, for anybody who does not believe in MALT would easily find it trite and preferable to stay in his or her comfort zone, which without doubt, would be nothing else but a jump back into TONA. For this reason, More Action Less Talk is actually alien to the believers of TONA for adherents of that talk syndrome are almost always found wanting when the opportunity arises for them to prove their worth and mettle in any given field of endeavour. If in doubt about such a position, any reader is invited to conduct a random sampling of the work ethic, dedication and performance of those who used to talk loudly into our ears and have eventually found themselves in positions that afford them the opportunity to implement the very things they waxed eloquently about. Much as this writer would have preferred not to mention a name, I think the extent to which TONA has taken over our energy sector is worth identifying as a classic case of the dichotomy between TONA and MALT.
Were we not presented with copious statements on the way in which the energy sector had been mismanaged by the previous administration and that the experts in the current ruling government of Ghana would make energy, specifically issues related to fossil fuel such a well coordinated and reliable source of energy for the Ghanaian people and the state as a whole? But since TONA syndrome is not one that can be broken simply by holding unto the reins of power, here we are with weekly excuses, stretching from such pathetic statements as “I don’t know why the oil is not here” to “the previous government must be blamed for not clearing the debt”. A MALT syndrome adherent would simply do the “A” in the malt, which would be to produce the oil. MALT syndrome advocates look for results of actions and determinedly veer away from excuses as to why what should have happened failed to happen. Now taking a MALT country into perspective: what would the Japanese have shown to the world after their industrial base was bombed to smithereens? They could have blamed the Emperor for stretching their armada into Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941 and inviting such venom from the Americans unto their land. Instead, they chose not to talk but rigidly adhere to an action plan to change their course and offer absolutely no time for excuses in that endeavour. Today, here we are, begging them for this or that money to construct roads, never mind that we export almost 70% of our premium grade cocoa to their land for a company called Lotte to produce a piece of chocolate appropriately named “Ghana” fetching them unbelievable revenue some of which they lend to our TONA ideologues. Yet, these same TONA adherents would not learn anything from such attitudes but would readily lump them together with all of the western world and pontificate that “after all, they came to colonize us and we deserve compensation from them”, as if we are the only persons who were colonized. Did the Malaysians not taste some level of colonization? What about Singapore? As for the Koreans, they even went to war among themselves and divided their land into North and South, perhaps forever. Mauritius, Botswana and Brazil as well as India have all gone through the same things that Ghana as a nation experienced in the past and yet, they chose to go the MALT way by deliberately and sometimes forcefully banning anything with a semblance of TONA.
Propaganda
Yet, Uncle TONA sits on Ghana radio from 06:30 GMT till 10:00 every weekday and screams himself hoarse, complaining about the unjust world economic order and the unfairness of international trade, as if the aforementioned nations among others, engage in international trade on planet Venus with angel wing spacecrafts that take off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The secret of their success is simply the taking of a decision to make a sharp detour from that backward and populist tendency towards an action-oriented path of result-seeking attitudes so that Ghana, with its great potential and natural resources, some of which have created extremes of open jealousy can make itself a behemoth within its sub-region. If we have failed to achieve the greatness envisaged by the comity of nations for Ghana, it is clearly because we are strict, nay unrepentant adherents to the useless trend of TONA, symptomized in recent times by its first-foster child also known as propaganda for that is the most dangerous signpost of a TONA worshipping people. If this were not so, how do we explain the tendency to continue propagating propaganda after the balance of power shifted on January 7, 2009 when a new group was given the mandate of the people to rule, ostensibly because the previous government had not satisfied the expectations of Ghanaians?
Thus, after being elected into office to simply fix the so-called “mess” created by its predecessor, the ruling government and its ministers is still waxing eloquent with propagandist ease, explaining and excusing itself from that which it was elected specifically to do. If that is not TONA, the reader is welcome to the realms of political gymnastics. John Kufuor for all his faults was indeed a master reader of international relations, one that afforded him the opportunity to weave and worm himself into the hearts and minds of the most powerful people on the planet. Using that as a base, he launched Ghana into high levels of recognition and with that, gained favours that otherwise would have never accrued to this Land of Our Death. How else do we explain his quick resolution of the fuel crisis that confronted him after he swore the Presidential Oath on December 7, 2001? How was it that he managed to get the Japanese cancel almost $2 billion of our debts when debt cancellation was anathema to their national economic psyche? What about his constant invitation to every single G8 meeting? What influence allowed him to jump-start the construction of the Bui Dam, the widening of the Accra-Aburi-Mampong highway and the hosting of numerous conferences in Accra? That certainly is the attitude of someone who clearly understands what the symptoms of TONA would do to Ghana and thus veered off that path: is it not a truism that even his most ardent critics, including the ones who say they “hate him” confess that the man hardly speaks? Has anybody bothered to find out why? So if members of the hoteliers association are complaining that “business is slow, because instead of going out there to lobby for conferences to be held in Accra as the previous government was doing, ministers are sitting on radio and television promoting local tourism”, are they not in effect telling us that they have had enough of the TONA syndrome, at least as it pertains to tourism and its cascading outcome on job creation and economic growth?
We cannot talk ourselves into international greatness: no nation has been able to do that and even if that were possible, our talker in chief, Kofi Nwiah would have achieved that before 1966. What we can do is to change course, a sort of national re-orientation that clearly spells out where we are going: work hard, talk less, listen more and mark our achievements only by the tangible results of what we have produced. We cannot continue our love affair with the demons of excuse giving, who have wormed themselves into the national psyche through the TONA syndrome. We can break the hegemonic deficiency that has unfortunately become our lot, for we indeed cast ourselves into the playground of ridicule when we belch our increasing national slogan “Gateway to West Africa” only to find that we are not even a listening post unto ourselves. Countries that are gateways to the regions within which they find themselves do not tell anybody: their actions show. If in doubt, Dubai is a good place to look, having earned for itself the title “the Paris of the Middle East” or Malaysia which has made Tourism something to look forward to by becoming the platform for the tourist’s incursion into Asia. If these countries have been able to do it, I submit that it was not by sitting on radio or television to embark on political debit and credit accounting; they did it by spending talk time on educating their masses so as to create an attitude of doing in lieu of talking. Can we do just that? Can we decide that we have had enough of the talking and that it is time for as to replace that Talk Only No Action with More Action Less Talk? May Jehovah Ori give us the insight and conviction to do what we know we have to do.