Thou Elephant, go to the Ant and learn!
It is another weekend. If you want to seek a place to rest your tired bones beyond Nigeria; then Ghana is the choice destination. The reason for this is not far to seek. Ghana happens to be Nigeria’s nearest Anglophone neighbour. Next door virtually is the Republic of Benin, to be followed by Togo and then Ghana.
As you get into Benin, depending on your sub nationality as a Nigerian, a feeling of ambiguity is bound to descend on you. This is more so if you are of Yoruba stock. You will find that there are also Yoruba speaking peoples. But this is where the similarity, as good as it is, ends. French is the language on offer and to this extent, you are out of your depths. The alienation gets deepened by the fact that there are also non Yoruba speaking peoples in Benin Republic. So if you were a truant in those days when French as a language was on offer in your high school, you will begin to rue those days you wilfully absconded from classes.
So, what to do? You will move on to Togo. And in this particular social formation, the Yoruba speaking peoples will be very few, save for the Ogbomosos who are to be found everywhere along the West Coast. Therefore, and once again you have to move on. And so you reach Ghana. Almost immediately, you feel at home. The English language is the main language here just as in Nigeria. So welcome to Ghana, another Commonwealth country.
For me personally, Ghana is a country that was part of my adolescent years. I attended this snotty school which every year, played annual games with Achimota College, Ghana’s premier secondary grammar school. On and off, annually the Ghanaians would come here and in the next year, we would go over there. In Ghana there was always a media feast about this annual interaction but no such media orchestration was to be seen in Nigeria here. Sociologists would ascribe the difference to elite cohesion in one country, which was lacking in the other.
However, I came away from this interaction with a more than an average knowledge of Ghana. Till date, I can always hum the Ghanaian national anthem. That, I suppose, is an unconscious pay-off when you attend the kind of school that is able to counter-pose itself to Achimota College on the platform of sports. So on one fine day I decided to surprise my friend, a Ghanaian colleague in Covenant University. He was sitting beside me, so I started to hum the words of his country’s anthem. Naturally, he was startled. Where did you pick that from, he queried. Clearly he was very surprised.
But even then and beyond high school days, especially on the platform of my professional pursuits, I have had to interact with Ghana. Almost every year and for close to five years, I served as an external examiner to the University of Ghana in Legon. And since the comparative spirit comes easily to most of us, each time I go there, my eyes and ears are always open, drinking in the Ghanaian scene and in the process making comparisons with Nigeria.
Definitely, it is a smaller country and its people almost laid back. Unlike Nigerian banks where the doors and entrances are fortified, no such situation exists in Ghana. The grim joke in the country is that there are no armed robbers in Ghana, that the only ones are either Nigerians or Ghanaians who have lived in Nigeria. So much for stereotypes or even vilification if you like. Even then, the stereotype does not end there. There is also this notion, rightly or wrongly that in terms of temperament, Nigerians are aggressive compared to Ghanaians. In the course of discussion one fateful day with the Director of the Legon Centre for International Affairs, he remarked wistfully that such is the aggression and can-do spirit of Nigerian students that they often pass through Legon in the course of their trips to Ivory Coast. Sadly enough, he remarked that Ghanaian students lack this spirit of adventure.
However, what has brought the difference between Ghana and Nigeria forcefully home to me lies in a particular experience in that country. Again, courtesy of fate, I was drafted to evaluate and engage with some tertiary institutions in that country as an agent of Quality Control. I am not a stranger to this particular exercise in Nigeria. What usually happens here, is that, as part of the hospitality package, some form of courtesy will be extended to you in fiscal terms. I was waiting to see whether this would play out in Ghana. So we were now in Legon. Subsequently we went to another famous University in Kumasi. In both places the usual hospitality was extended to us. But nothing changed hands in fiscal terms.
This I suppose is one major difference between Nigeria and Ghana. But before the reader gets away with the impression that Ghanaians are saints and that only devils reside here. No, this Manichean world view cannot be sustained in the face of other realities. I was on another excursion one day with students. We had an accident and ended up in a police station. In the process, I found myself occupying a ringside seat in an Accra police station. People were trooping in and out and I could observe some interesting transactions between the people and the police personnel. Very much like what happens in Nigeria.
Initially I was taken aback. And then I remembered, Ayi Kwei Armah who authored that classic book: The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Since art mirrors life, the novel set in Ghana dwelt trenchantly on the issue of corruption in Ghana. In the process, he used imageries and metaphors that engendered disgust and revulsion. After reading the book, one may wonder that if Armah were to be a Nigerian, then what would he write. Clearly, he may be too paralyzed and dumb to write anything in view of the monumental scourge here.
The immediate foregoing may well explain why Ghana continues to take the cake in terms of being a favourite destination for foreign investments. Starting with power, through well-tarred roads to social capital, the country is far ahead of Nigeria. So far ahead that a Ghanaian business man once quipped in derisive reference to Nigeria that: What can a generator economy produce? This is a painful question. It goes a long way to explain why in relative terms, Nigeria continues to lag behind her smaller neighbour in the critical area of development. But even then and despite this dismal profile, we can still turn the table. But are we ready? And to boot, is anyone listening?
Prof. Soremekun, immediate past Vice Chancellor of Federal University Oye-Ekiti, is the editorial board chairman of BusinessDay
