When I got to Achimota School, Kwame Pianim was long gone. So far gone that his son Nicholas was my senior. I comment on his recent lecture with that in mind, as an African steeped in earned respect for elders.
We are living in very troubling times in Ghana, and of that few doubt these days. I have increasingly concluded that we must hammer out a consensus which enables our more experienced hands to be put to the till too.
But since we have created a media and debate culture that values invective over reasoned debate, which is now characterised by intellectually lazy serial callers, how can we ever attract senior citizens to participate in the debate and share their valuable perspectives? Too many of them do not want to be mauled by what we have come to call in Ghana, “the babies with sharp teeth.”
These babies with sharp teeth are experts on everything, as far as media debates go. Often, they have spent all of five minutes studying a subject, then the media christens them as “social commentators.” This is an amorphous, catch-all reference that has no known criteria of qualification, beyond appearance on a media facility and an ability to shout like screaming Banshees.
Shout something, shout everything, shout anything. If you shout loud enough, the media promotes you to the status of Guru! Or if you are a lawyer, Legal Luminary!
The day some media person tries to call me anything like this is the day I will be imprisoned for murder. It is enough to simply call me Yaw Nsarkoh, let what I what say or write speak for itself.
We Africans say: that good drumming does not require advertisement. This intellectual laziness and fascination with empty epithets and unearned titles must be the proof Cheik Anta Diop sought in his studies for our links to Pharaonic antecedents. Some of our numbers are best described as congenitally feudal in such matters.
Now that I have got that off my chest, let me again congratulate Kwame Pianim, in such an environment, for daring to speak out. We thank him. I have known him for years but never spoken to him. Although many times I have been in meetings and at the same venue with him.
He is mortal, frail and fallible like us all. He has not claimed more than that. I therefore sincerely pray that he will be spared the ad hominem attacks and nonsense that even some Professors seem unable to desist from in Ghana these days. Let us debate his ideas, which were presented originally and creatively.
Like him, like him not, hate him, it is possible to say about Pianim that he is willing to put out his views, even if the sky falls. For this alone, I will salute him any day.
Knowing him, I also know his economic philosophy and therefore his prescriptions do not at all surprise me. I agree with many but have a more nuanced take on a few. Let us put it this way, if you construct a spectrum from Milton Friedman to Andre Gunder-Frank (Friedman’s PhD student that some of us say turned into his nemesis), Kwame Pianim will fit somewhere closer to Friedman than Gunder-Frank. Though I do not know exactly where.
My comments then are:
- I agree that we must tackle population growth, a Robinson Crusoe Society that reproduces at the rate we are doing is a menace to world peace. I simply add that population control is also achieved by improving livelihoods too. Therefore, the causality here is not linear. Get more women to the workplace and more people into meaningful jobs, and the course of human history everywhere shows that they are not going to keep having six children on average. It is not difficult to see why. Hence when we discuss population growth we must also link it to improving livelihoods and liberating the productive forces, not just the neoliberal fixation on vasectomy and contraceptives. The latter matters too but they are not enough.
- Very charitably, and generously, for a man like Pianim, he made a qualifier to his use of the South Korean comparison to Ghana. I do not deny that South Korea benefited from American benevolence but so did Mobutu and Jomo Kenyatta and the Philippines. So we must not explain Korea’s success and our comparative retardation only with that factor, which I concede is not what he tried to do. We must look deeper to understand how we became such a Robinson Crusoe Society in Ghana in 2023.
- True to form, he calls for right-sizing the state. Which I agree with at some level but have fundamental disagreements with as articulated by the neoliberal NPP, his party. But I need not say more. In listing what the state should do, Pianim comes up with health, tax, security, control and ownership of strategic assets such as airports, harbours, electricity and water provision and distribution of mineral resources and tax collection. I will be charitable and say that this implies that the state must be competent and create a law-based society that arouses its citizens’ initiative and creative energy to liberate and emancipate the productive forces. We can shake hands to that, for his list only seems to leave out prayers to God for us all to get to heaven. WE NEED A COMPETENT STATE!
And I will leave it there. Once again, congratulations to the senior economist. One who by any definition and criteria can be called that. Not these babies with sharp teeth that these days litter the media landscape with ignorance. Hopefully, Akufo-Addo will make peace with Pianim and sit to talk this time.
Yaw Nsarkoh,
12 December 2023.
PS. If you want a copy of Pianim’s material and do not have it, please let me know and I will send it to you privately. In these tough economic times, I do not want to take liberties with people’s data. Lol
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