Opinions of Saturday, 25 August 2007
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
No News: "70 % of Ghanaians Want to Leave"
A recent “unscientific” survey conducted for Ghanaweb.com, by an unidentified agency, reported that of some 1,630 Ghanaian adults questioned between April and June 2007, 70-percent, or 1,141 respondents, indicated their willingness to leave the country in search of the proverbial greener pastures.
While, indeed, the survey may have multiple implications, depending on how it is interpreted, it was not “scientifically” conducted, because the survey conductors did not provide their audiences with any statistical margins of error, for instance. It was also not specific, in terms of target age-groupings of the respondents as well as class or economic backgrounds, other than to tangentially observe that the respondents included college graduates.
The survey conductors would also have done their audiences a lot of good if they had also indicated the demographic or geographical spread of their sampling. For example, how many respondents came from either the Northern or Southern sectors of the country? Likewise, a more scientific survey would have explored the ethnicity of the respondents, and how this immutable variable, or factor, subtended their motivation to venture abroad into perceived realms of greener pastures. And even more significantly, the survey conductors could also have factored in how the ideological persuasion, or political party affiliation, also played a role in the motivation of the respondents’ intention, or expressed wish, to leave the country.
Then again, another significant angle that appears to have been left out of the survey is that of “Gender.” For instance, what percentages of men and women surveyed were inclined to make such a move? In sum, the survey left too many significant factors out of the loop, as it were, to be taken seriously.
The preceding notwithstanding, the survey reminded this writer of a period during the late 1980s, when Mr. Rawlings’ so-called Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) made life virtually unworthy of living for the majority of Ghanaians. Back then, this writer lamented to many a Ghanaian resident of the proverbial “Big Apple” – New York City, that is – that if he had any political clout, he would have shipped all well-meaning and hardworking Ghanaians out of the country, so as to let Mr. Rawlings and his family have Ghana all to themselves. For such was what the thrust of his murderous policies amounted to.
Interestingly, the aforementioned survey was released just a few days after Mr. Rawlings and his wife left the United States for Ghana, after having raised a reportedly whopping sum of $ 700,000 (Seven-Hundred Thousand American Dollars) for their proxy-presidential campaign war chest in the run-up to Election 2008. And even at the time of this writing (8/16/07), Mr. Rawlings’ political surrogate and protégé, Professor John Evans Atta-Mills, had just arrived in the United States, on a fundraising tour of the various Ghanaian communities.
The point that yours truly is trying to register here is that for a people who spent the bulk of their two decades in power denouncing the United States as an insatiable, imperialist cormorant, it is quite quaint, to speak much less of the outright grotesque, that Mr. Rawlings and his minions would be incessantly trooping into the heartland of “capitalist greed,” as the editor of the so-called National Democratic Congress-sponsored newspaper, Lens, recently put it. Actually, in impudently presuming to revile the ideological suasion of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), the editor of Lens had described the Kufuor government as a “property-grabbing” political juggernaut.
Interestingly, some 24 years ago, during the bloody heat of his so-called Revolutionary Exercise, Mr. Rawlings had instituted a radio program, which was beamed daily to Ghanaians and the outside world via the airwaves of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), called “LET THE PEOPLE KNOW,” in which the PNDC government presumed to be enlightening the rest of the world on the alleged anti-Third World activities of the West, in general, but the United States, in particular.
And so, if one may aptly ask: Exactly what happened that now Mr. Jeremiah John “Don’t Mind Foreign Intervention” Rawlings should decide to make the United States of America his destination of choice abroad?
This year alone, on a conservative count, Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings have entered the United States some five times! We are, here, less worried about the financial underwriters of their “tours” than exactly what they have abruptly learned about the United States that is so auspicious as to make them frequent America in, literally, the same manner that one frequents the bathroom or lavatory.
And here, also, we crave to know what kind of radio (and television) program Mr. Rawlings would create about the United States today, were he Chairman Rawlings of Ghana in the year 2007? “AMERICA: I HAVE FOUND A POT OF GOLD”?
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
