Crime in Ghana is influenced by factors like the high cost of living and unemployment

The high cost of living and unemployment in many countries of the world are conditions for the emergence of various kinds of mass negative social phenomena, including crime. Hardships due to unemployment and the high cost of living in Ghana are some of the reasons crime has increased in the country.

If the Ghana police will admit it, it is increasingly noted that arrested criminals, including armed robbers, are people who do not have a job and a permanent source of income. Hardships and immense poverty, force many Ghanaians to commit serious crimes that continue to affect the communities in the country.

Despite the vast mineral resources in Africa, which have been the source of better economies and unemployment in developed countries, Ghana continues to be one of the African countries facing an unemployment crisis even though its cocoa has been a blessing to the developed world.

It doesn’t make sense to anyone who knows that a country has gold, bauxite, diamonds, timber, cocoa, etc., yet it lacks job creation to employ the youth who come out of schools and universities every year. Yet in European countries, especially in Belgium, proceeds from its chocolate industries continue to sustain the economy while employing thousands of Belgians.

Ghana’s unemployment crisis is not only sad but a tragedy because the problem is man-made and has nothing to do with natural disaster issues. Talking about man-made centers of corruption, Ghanaian politicians prefer to steal money abroad to fund the building of factories and companies to employ the youth.

In any serious country where corruption is so severe that it has affected the ordinary people, the government should have been serious about salvaging the old, collapsing industries and factories. Unfortunately, many of the factories built by Kwame Nkrumah have been abandoned, creating unprecedented hardship for ordinary Ghanaians.

In any country, a part of the population that does not have a permanent source of income is a serious social problem that increases the level of criminality in that social group. Therefore, it’s likely that crime will continue to increase since rural dwellers are migrating to the cities in search of jobs that don’t exist.

How can these problems be solved if that is the main issue? As I have indicated, this is one of my articles written some time ago. If it’s difficult for the NPP government to build new factories and industries, there are many factories built by Kwame Nkrumah that have been abandoned and are not functioning.

The NPP government must invest in all those abandoned factories to revive and salvage them to reduce the unemployment crisis. Some of these factories' products can be changed. For example, a factory can be converted into a cocoa products factory since Ghana is one of the leading countries in cocoa production to relieve the suffering of the unemployed.