At Accra International Airport, two lines tell the whole story of Ghana. One line is going out. Young men with one big checked bag and a small backpack, holding visas to Canada, the UK, Germany, and Qatar. Their faces are tight. Not excited. Frustrated. They have degrees, they have English, they have ambition, but Ghana has no bed for their dreams to sleep on. So they export themselves.
The other line is coming in. Consultants. Lebanese contractors. Chinese technicians with toolboxes. Turkish tile layers. Indian rice importers. American “experts” coming to teach us how to do what we already know how to do. They are holding solutions.
That is Ghana in one sentence: We export our frustration, and we import our solutions. And we have been doing it so long, we think it is normal.
What We Export: Frustration in a Suitcase. Frustration is now our biggest export product. Bigger than cocoa. Bigger than gold.
1. We Export People Because We Couldn’t Export Their Products. Kofi finished KNUST as an electrical engineer. Top of his class. For two years, he applied for a job to fix the very lights that go out in his hometown. No job. The interview required five years’ experience for an entry-level role. So Kofi left. Today, Kofi fixes lights in Leeds. He pays taxes in Leeds. He has bought a house in Leeds. Ghana trained him. Leeds is enjoying him.
This is the new Gold Coast – not gold leaving our shores in ships, but brains leaving in planes. Doctors who trained at Korle Bu are now in Ohio. Nurses who trained at Korle-Bu are now in Manchester. Plumbers who learned at Suame Magazine are now in Dubai, plumbing for Arabs who never had to import a plumber.
We export them not because they hate Ghana. We export them because Ghana told them, “We don’t need you yet.” And so they leave, frustrated, WhatsApping home: “Chale, Ghana for make i tire.”
2. We Export Raw Materials and Import Their Insults.
We grow cocoa and export it at $2,000 a tonne, then import Swiss chocolate at US$20 a bar and put it in our supermarkets for our ministers to buy for Christmas. We dig gold in Obuasi, Tarkwa, Bibiani, export it raw, then import gold necklaces from Dubai for our weddings.
We cut timber in the Western Region and export logs, then import Chinese plywood and call it “foreign door, quality door.”
Even our frustrations, we export raw. A Ghanaian youth will go on TikTok and rant for five minutes about the system – raw frustration – and a Canadian NGO will package that rant into a documentary, get funding, and import it back to us as a “solution workshop.”
We have mastered the art of selling low and buying high. It is the economics of a man who sells his farm to buy fried rice.
3. We Export Our Complaints.
Check Ghana Twitter at 9 pm. It is a factory of complaints. “System no good.” “Leaders no good.” “Country hard.” We have become professional complainers. We complain so beautifully, so poetically, so angrily, that we have exported the Ghanaian complaint to the world.
The world now knows Ghanaians as people who are suffering and smiling. We have made frustration our identity. We are no longer “Ghana, the first to gain independence.” We are “Ghana, where the youth want to japa.”
What We Import: Solutions We Already Had
For every frustration we export, we import a solution we could have made in the backyard.
We Import Rice When Aveyime and Nasia Can Feed Us. Ghana spends over $1 billion a year importing rice. Rice! A crop that grows in Volta, in the Northern Region, in places where our own grandmothers used to plant it with bare feet. But we let the irrigation dams silt. We let the extension officers sit in offices. We let the local rice brand suffer with stones inside. Then we go and import polished Thai rice and say, “Local rice no dey sweet.”
We imported the problem. Then we imported the solution.
We Import Technicians to Fix What Our Own Boys Can Fix. A big hotel in Accra needs its air conditioners fixed. The Ghanaian technician from Kaneshie says it will cost GH¢5,000. The manager says, “No, bring the Turkish guy.” The Turkish guy charges US$5,000, and they pay, and they call it quality.
A church needs a sound system. The boys at Kantamanto can wire it. But they want a South African sound engineer. Because we have been taught that anything Ghanaian is inferior, and anything imported is superior.
We have what psychologists call “colonial inferiority complex” dressed in a suit and calling itself “standard.”
We Import Governance Solutions.
We import democracy consultants to teach us democracy. We import sanitation solutions from Singapore to teach us how not to throw rubbish in the gutter. We import leadership books from America to teach us how to lead people who are sitting right in front of us.
A district assembly cannot clear a choked gutter until a donor from Denmark funds a “gutter-clearing stakeholder engagement workshop.” We need a white man to tell us our gutter smells.
This is the peak of importing solutions.
Why Do We Do This? Because maintenance is harder than purchase. It is easy to buy a new thing. It is hard to maintain an old thing. Ghana loves to buy, launch, commission, cut sod. We don’t love to maintain, repair, service, or protect.
So we let the factory built by Nkrumah rot, then we import Chinese batteries. We let the sugar factory at Komenda rust, then we import Brazilian sugar. We let the shoe factory at Kumasi die, then we import Kantamanto second-hand shoes and call it business.
Because we punish our own experts and worship foreign ones.
A Ghanaian proposes a solution, we say: “Who knows you? Where is your PhD from abroad? Where is your English accent?” A foreigner proposes the same solution with a PowerPoint, we clap and give him a contract and a Prado.
Because frustration is more profitable than fixing. There are people in this country whose entire job depends on things being broken. If the system works, they have no contract. If the youth are not frustrated, they have no NGO. If the schools work, they have no need to import educational consultants. So they let it break. They monetize the breakage.
The cost is that we are becoming a country that cannot solve its own sneezes without importing tissue. A country that exports its children and imports its food cannot be a country. It is a supermarket. And supermarkets don’t have citizens. They have customers.
If we don’t stop, one day we will export all our frustration until there is no one left to be frustrated, and we will import all the solutions until there is nothing left to be solved – because the country itself will be owned by the people we imported.
The plane leaving Accra Airport must start carrying products, not just people.
The plane coming into Accra Airport must start carrying tourists, not just technicians. Until then, we remain exactly what we are: A nation that digs gold, but begs for a golden future.
Alexander Afriyie, Supervising Editor, Ghanacrimereport.com and ghanatalk.com.
