Map of Africa
This week I was at the national studios of GBC to share thoughts on why we have to give more attention to the boys who start the teenage pregnancy problem. But before our turn on the Breakfast Show, there was a delegation of the International Youth Fellowship from South Korea in the country to promote the good practice they experienced in South Korea (SK) which moved them from a poor country 50 years ago to their present global status.
They called it a shift in mindset. It was underpinned by the concept of deep thinking. The emphasis was on “deep”; not in the direction of deepfake.
The story of South Korea is hinged on competent leadership; but not just that.
Like the contemporary Rwanda Journey under Kigamy, SK had gone through a painful phase of civil war that broke the country into a painful North and South duo that run deep, even at the family level. But when people cite Rwanda as a learning point for Ghana, I am hesitant because we do not need a genocide to make us wiser than our present thinking status.
Liberia is still struggling to come out of the woods, even though there is always hope of light at the end of the tunnel. But, yes, maybe we are too much at ease in Ghana that’s why we wallow in mediocrity and spit out volumes of words without commensurate endeavour. If we need something drastic, then deep thinking, deep learning is recommended.
I am having some seasonal liking for Bernard Avle of Citi FM. Today, again accidentally while waiting for my wife’s consistently sumptuous breakfast, I heard the 2017 best journalists humbly appreciate that he needed to do some more learning on some important issues because he sensed significant gaps in his appreciation of a topical matter.
This happened as he conversed with his colleague on an ICT subject related to big data, operating systems, the hostage diplomacy between Canada and China in relation to the allegation of Huawei breaking a law to undermine US sanctions imposed on Iran.
Canada had to blinkingly release the Meng with three names: Wanzhou, Cathy Sabrina; for their two Michaels, Spavor and Kovrig. Now Huawei is developing its own operating system different from Google's Android and Apple’s IOS. China has taken advantage of the hostage diplomacy experience to leapfrog the realization of its technology ambitions.
The point about Bernard is that he admitted he needed to do some more learning, if that was not to hide from an apparently superior explanation his colleague was giving for the meaning of Africa becoming the next global frontline because of the large “Africa Market”. Because while his colleague (I think, he is called Kojo or something?) was applying some first principles in the concept of “market” as the platform for “buying and selling”, and how we can benefit from the huge “Africa Market” (especially with the emergence of AfCTA) if we positioned ourselves well as sellers who can make huge profits from their products rather than the business as usual position of we being the buyers who seem to have become perpetual consumers of western products by which others leach out of us untold profits that keep their trade dominance over us.
Bernard was insisting on what I thought was virtually his stereotype of the Africa mind: that Africa as a big market only meant that we have become a place where others come to reap profits at our expense.
He really needed some more learning; I thought and think Bernard knows much, very much. So for him to admit a sub-threshold knowledge level on such a matter was praise worthy; and also maybe because he is a first class in Economics and has a higher degree in Economics from an “amanone” (foreign) Uni. But perhaps he referred more to the subject of Lithium; which he knows little about. I consider Bernard as an emerging deep thinker. He is showing to be a deep learner as all such thinkers should be.
Ghana’s Volta basin has commercial quantities of Lithium; a mineral among the ten most expensive in the world. But when we see what is happening in DR Congo, we shudder to think Africa’s nightmare is still not over; in spite of the dead deadly slaying triploid: slavery, colonialism and apartheid. Today, after hard fought political independence we still allow others sell us arms to fight and kill each other while they descend to devastate our forest and mine away precious minerals to manufacture phones and electric cars for now and then.
Then they flood our huge empty Africa Market to sell the inferior versions of gadgets to our shallow-thinking economy while they use the superior versions, like the electric cars they are now using to “clean” the dirty hands which have destroyed our climate. When in July this year Europe announced the seizure in production of fossil fuel cars by 2035, was it to show off as a climate-concerned region? We wait for the outcome of COP26.
Lithium mining can make another Congo out of Ghana, just like oil is not making us any better than Nigeria; even if uncle Charles may have passed with his relatively peaceful secessionist ideas. Not even a South Africa without Apartheid has a better story on the continent. We need deep learning! Deep learning that would make us deep thinkers en masse.
Sure, we have many deep learners and deep thinkers in our country but we are either not up to the quantity of critical mass due to lesser numbers or we have lesser collaboration and cooperation. The few “deepers” we have largely operate in silos, perhaps hoping to be latter day Bezoses and Musks. But Lithium can turn our fortunes, as fast as dusk turns to day at midnight.
The world is at a midnight hour: technology has become so swift it is making valleys out of the mountains we so much were hitherto hindered by. We need a critical mass of deep learners who will function in the higher orders cognitive capabilities comparable to deep blue. Deep thinking will bless us with intellectual property; that commodity so scarce in the market because no one sells theirs until the season of declassification comes after a near-epoch (you will have to be a diplomatic thief smarter than your victim otherwise you would ensue a trade war similar to what is keeping China and the United States of America in perpetual cold war).
Civil society Organisations, including churches and the Media must help us mobilise much more young minds, more than the handful we are assisting through our publicity scholarships; and equip them to become deep thinkers. We should facilitate the creation of specialised software engineering and coding programmes in each of our 260 districts across the country. The digital centres concentrated in Accra are not at all enough. Presently, we have many of our young people who are coding, designing IT programmes and developing APPs.
We need to move lower the ladder to get our children (seven to 15 year-olds) in rural areas organised into coding schools. We need Foresight Academies. If those who will be fifteen years old in the next twenty-five years will be born in the next ten years, we have as much as ten years to plan and plot the kind of adolescents we will have in 2046. Surely, if there are any true leaders in our country today, this is not too much asking, is it?
Secondly, we need to make more out of people like Dr. Thomas Mensah.
When I met Dr. Mensah at a function organised by the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), I left the meeting thinking we had just listened to another big-mouth talk-do-little fellow. Yes, a fellow because that is what many fellow Ghanaians are. But a fortnight ago I was mercifully reminded by a group of telecom engineers fixing fibre-optic cables in our small Cross-Cutting Excellence (CCE) Office at La, No. 41, 3rd Otswe street how, much this great son of the soil had accomplished. Dr Mensah is a patent holder of more than a few high-end inventions, including something about fibre optics.
Now he is past his seventh decade on earth, but we still have not tapped much to make a fortune of this God-given blessing. In his presentation at the NDPC forum, he mentioned many ideas being worked on. It would be encouraging to have him tell us how far these are nearing fruition; and what the sustainability plans are? There are many more sure heroes of deep thinking on our continent.
Finally, may each of us be charged as individuals, especially our intellectuals within and without, to do many more concrete things for the long term so that the value of intellectual elitism will be appreciated by the masses of our people, far and near. Deep thinking beckons. Ghana!