Opinions of Saturday, 2 May 2009

Columnist: MP

What went wrong with Ghana

52 years after post colonial rule of this country and Ghana the beloved country is still trailing behind in terms of establishing an economy worthy of praise and admiration by the majority of its citizens.

Several governments have come and gone without successfully realizing the dream of an economic prosperity and social equity, the two main pursuits which vividly define a well developed nation.

And we could trace this cause to some of our leaders who were too logical to be reasonable or perhaps were too egotistical to be objective in their approach in realizing that dream.

One of the great programmes which were vehemently prioritized during the colonial era must have been education. See, most hold it in their hearts that education is the ultimate cure to man’s illiteracy, some even consider it to be some sort of mental purging which allows the individual to see the scientific world for what it is as opposed to what it isn’t.

And some would argue it to be the main cause behind all successful endeavours, either social, political or economically oriented, I consider it to be the key which unlocks the doors of our creativity. And creativity correlates to development, because you first have to create in other to develop whatever you created.

In other words creativity starts in the mind and works itself through the human pores to be developed. There are two types of human creative expressions mainly, the emotional and the mental and what differentiates these two from each other is that, whilst the mental is a projection of the mind and therefore could be seen, the emotional on the hand cannot be seen, but could be felt nonetheless.

And so like all expressions whether verbal or non verbal, mental or emotional, discipline must be in order for sense to prevail.

See, the majority of black people are anarchist by nature and seem to have a problem living in an environment where discipline, time and order are preserved and in the case of Ghana one could say the lack of an adequate address system in the country does indeed hold this theory to be somewhat factual.

And perhaps it's this natural need to be irresponsibly chaotic in other to feel free in our natural habitat, which has contaminated our overall actions in dealing with some of our simplest problems and even as controversial and thought provoking as this might sound, a study has confirmed that the less developed a nation, the more its citizens are inclined to living in filthy surroundings

And you could either disagree or agree on this, however we have to be realistic that most third world countries don’t often realize the significance of public sanitation, the obvious cause being the absence of discipline in the minds of the citizens of these so called third world or under-developed countries, because mind you, development, like science, could only be understood and successfully realized by the orderly minded.

And so the time has come for new to replace to old ways of doing things, because any nation poised on building a wealthy interdependent economy intended on competing on the global front, has to apply the secret rule of creating with whatever its got or been given at any given instance, especially in this time and age.

So the question we all should be asking is;

1. Is education responsible for a well developed nation?

2. Are all well educated individuals developed and if so, then how come that Ghana with its academia, literati, writers, politicians and what have you is still very much considered under-developed?

The answers to these questions we must find.