PERISCOPE DEPTH
…With Our Publisher
On Saturday evening, I was sitting behind my desk in the house, working as usual, when my son handed me an envelope. When we opened it, it contained the invitation to the funeral of a friend. Kwame Abbey, died at age 56. For once, in a very long time, I wept. I wept to a wasted life, a wasted talent. I wept at the waste of so much potential.
The late Kwame Abbey was a maker of shoes. He was a cordwainer, that is, a shoemaker who makes new shoes from new leather. The cordwainer’s trade can be contrasted with that of the cobbler’s trade, according to a tradition in Britain that restricted cobblers to repairing shoes. This usage distinction is not universally observed, as the word cobbler is widely used for tradespersons who make or repair shoes.
Kwame was not a cobbler. He was not a repairer of shoes, and frankly, if you took your shoe to him to be repaired, he would not have known what to do for you. He bought new leather and other materials, and actually crafted them into new shoes.
Now, the art of the cordwainer is a fast disappearing art, but even so, the death of one, surely, is not something so momentous as to attract an article piece in a newspaper. Surely, that is, until you were privileged enough to see the work of this man.
I have no doubt at all, that Kwame died a broken man, poor, ridiculed and reviled among his relatives in Kumasi. I can understand. I met him nearly thirty-five years ago in Accra, when both of us were relatively young. I studied the work of the cordwainer under another Master Cordwainer, and it is how I came to know Kwame, from which meeting which struck up many years of friendship.
Kwame was a talented person. I have no doubt at all in my mind, that in the right society, in the right community and at the right place, he would have been an immensely rich and influential person. Notable persons would have paid huge sums of monies to wear some of his creations. Here, in Ghana, he was limited to crafting shoes that he had to haggle to sell o mandarins and middlemen at Kantamanto and Kwame Nkrumah Circle, who always have two objects; to cheat the creator of the beauties they sell, and to cheat the people who loved to wear such creations.
Kwame was born and grew up in Ghana, where we do not create the enabling environment for talent to grow. Ghana is a nation with a heart of a cash register, and with about as much soul, talent and innovation. God protect you, if you are a man of talent who is unfortunate enough to be born in Ghana. Then, if you are such a person, this nation would wear you down, abuse you, disillusion you, and turn you into a pariah and an object of mockery to many much less talented than you.
Ghana is not a nation for talent; and it is understandable.
But how can any nation develop, when the resources of its natural talent are never identified, much less encouraged and nourished? How are we to create the innovation that leads to entrepreneurship and job creation, when talent is reviled, stamped into the ground and spat upon?
I have been hearing about the government of Ghana’s latest caper into job creation, which it has sexily nomenclature ‘youStart’, where people, presumably young people would be identified, groomed, given taxpayers money and set off on an adventure of entrepreneurship. I have no doubt at all, no doubt at all, that in a few years, we would be lamenting, as we have done on all such previous adventures with state and taxpayers money, about the monumental losses recorded by this latest adventure with free money. ‘youSTART’, like all its predecessors such as GYEEDA, NYA, YESDEP, LESDEP, and the many, many acronyms we have created in this country to create employment, is doomed to failure. The reasons are simple, really. First, inexperience is costly, and none of the people who would benefit under ‘youSTART’ would set off with the requisite experience. I wager that in about two years after we have given them the state grants, most if not all of them, would be bankrupt and back to exactly where they started.
The second reason why is ‘youSTART’ is bound to fail, is the macro-economic environment. It would be impossible to start a business and hope to see it succeed in an environment where the currency is plummeting at the speed of light, and where interest rates range at almost 30%.
The third reason is that it is almost impossible to identify realistic business ideas in a laboratory setting, which is the method that would be used to identify the ‘youSTART’ beneficiaries. Almost always, in an economy such as Ghana, plans remain fine so long as they are on paper, until they hit the ground of reality; then all hell would break loose.
Fourth, is Ghana’s unbridled import policy, which kills talent and innovation such as that of my late and much lamented friend, Kwame Abbey.Â
Kwame was never going to win the battle against second-hand shoes. Even in the absence of second-hand shoes, Kwame was never going to win the battle against imported shoes. Both of them would always be much cheaper, and control greater access to the market. It has been so, and the government (and I do not just mean the current government) simply lack the heart and muscles to do what is necessary. Kwame Abbey died disillusioned and disappointed; the hopes of the ‘youSTART’ adventurers would meet the same fate.
It is frightful to see the lack of hope in the eyes of Ghanaians. And anytime I see videos and pictures of Ghanaian communities living outside of Ghana, my heart weeps. I am beginning to think that there are more Ghanaians living outside Ghana, than there are in Ghana. This is a possibility.
This is truly the land of our death, until we decide that we would not allow it to be so.
(This article was first published in the column PERISCOPEÂ DEPTH of the Daily Searchlight of 22/06/2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com).
