In Ghana, the West African country hijacked by the Mis-Educated Than His Ancestors—the Metha—national affairs have been surrendered to the incompetent. And it shows. Accra, the so-called capital, no matter how loudly they boast of “development,” still reeks of open, filthy gutters that can swallow your car whole if you so much as swerve to dodge chaotic traffic. The city is so dusty and bushy that its public lawns along uncompleted roads look less like civic space than farmland left fallow.
Almost every house in Accra and the suburbs along a major road has a retail storefront—sometimes seven floors high—usually an uncompleted monstrosity of cement blocks and staircases jutting out to choke the already narrow, dusty, weedy sidewalks. Where these storefronts don’t harass your view, you can be sure plans are afoot to raise one soon.
Accra’s beaches are so foul you can smell how thoroughly the Metha have run the entire place into the ground. You can read the abecedarian state of the Metha’s mind in the capital itself. Better still, you can read it in how their intellectuals work, think, and write. A cursory glance at one university in Ghana, named after the Metha’s first president and Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, reveals the rot in their state of mind.
On one hand, the Metha hails a professor, “Dr. Emmanuel Ahene of the Department of Computer Science,” for securing a “three-year research grant to lead pioneering work on secure and privacy-preserving Artificial Intelligence (AI).” How can the Metha be this forward-thinking, you may ask? As it turns out, they are not. This grant is actually given “by the Office of Naval Research, Science and Technology, USA. The research team will develop a new framework for AI agents that can defend against adversarial attacks, protect sensitive data, and collaborate securely across networks.”
The Metha’s state of mind is so vacant he cannot see that another country’s Naval Research, exploiting Ghanaian talent on Ghanaian soil to “develop a new framework for AI agents,” is nothing less than a national security betrayal. Such a thing could never happen in a serious country, or at a serious university—least of all at one bearing the name of Kwame Nkrumah. The security mindlessness of the limaceous Metha is now legendary.
On the other hand, the Metha’s ground state of logical lapses is dotted, maybe twice a year, like a broken clock, with flashes of accidental clarity. The same university can be seen admonishing young scientists in the Chemistry Department “to see their work not only as a career but also as a patriotic duty critical to Ghana’s development.” What is not clear is whether the man who used these words, the Chairman of the Governing Council of the university, Akyamfour Asafo Boakye Agyemang-Bonsu, grasps the weight of the patriotism he invokes.
But such is the way of things in Ghana. From the dusty roads in every corner of the capital, to the gutters reeking with filth in the heart of Independence Square and the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum, to the incoherence of their universities, one thing is certain: Ghana will remain chained to filth and confusion until it triggers its own deterration from the dusty, flagitious minds of the Metha—parasites who mistake ignorance for wisdom, mediocrity for progress, and betrayal for patriotism.
Excellent piece. I was just on the phone to my wife talking about the lack of infrastructural development: there are massive potholes & dirt & debris everywhere with the remarkable exception of wherever government buildings are located. What an avoidable tragedy has struck this nation for nearly 60 years!
Such progress has been made! I would hate to see what regression looks like!