Skip to main content

Comparing Nigeria with Ghana: Raji Fashola is Right…But…

March 1, 2018

“Stop putting yourselves down. We are a great country. We have challenges. Let us go and deal with them together”, Raji Fashola had impassionedly upbraided us a couple of weeks ago while trying to describe (or rather, justify) the continuing epileptic supply of electricity in most of the country three years into the administration. Nigerians, he reasoned, were too fond of denigrating their own country.

I am very familiar with the African countries he mentioned in his condescending rationalization of grand ineptitude - Niger, Rwanda, Benin, Togo and Ghana. In fact, I have been an expatriate in Ghana for almost four years now, with official responsibilities covering a good portion of the continent. I have heard all kinds of things about Ghana; some very true, some true, some partially true, some patently false, and some pure fable. Consider these examples:

Ghanaian women prefer Nigerian men – Very True. Nigerian men are bigger spenders

Ghanaians are laid back – True; compared to Nigerians

Ghanaians are not as corrupt as Nigerians – Partially True; they just don’t have as much to steal as Nigerians do. Steal $10m out Ghana’s budget and the country may collapse

Ghana Jollof is better than Nigeria’s – Patently False. No one can touch Nigeria’s Jollof

Ghanaians hate Nigerians – Pure Fable; they may be jealous, not hate.

Image

But I thought Fashola might have a point. And I needed to find it. Living in Accra, it was easy for me to set out and try to validate or invalidate Fashola’s postulations: Should Nigerians cherish more what they have? Should we get together and deal with the challenges we have like he suggested?

So, a couple of weeks ago, I set out for a week-long road tour of Ghana. I had to see the entire country in order to have a complete picture. I had seen enough of Takoradi and Cape Coast - to the west…almost to the border with Cote D’Ivoire. I had seen everything from Accra to Tema and to Afflao…the border with Togo to the east. I had also seen Kumasi, the city four hours northwest of Accra in the Ashanti Region. But I hadn’t gone farther than that by road. I wanted to see all of Ghana. I wanted to go north…all the way north…in fact, punch through into Burkina Faso and come back. I wanted to be able to come back and tell Minister Fashola that he was wrong; that Ghana was not worse than Nigeria; that Nigerians complaining about conditions in the country were not spoilt brats.  And boy! What did I find out!

I took off from Accra at 7 a.m. on a Monday and headed northwesterly on the N6 in the direction of Kumasi. Once out of the Accra environs, the road became a two-lane (face-me-I-face-you) road for pretty much the rest of the drive to Kumasi. In fact, let me just state here right now that other than when I was in cities and towns, none of the highways was four-lane or more. Even the east-west (Takoradi-Cape Coast-Accra-Tema-Aflao) N1 is a two-lane road. Ghanaians have not “invested” in four-lane roads such as the Lagos-Ibadan, Ibadan-Oyo, Ogbomosho-Ilorin and others. I used to think they just didn’t have the financial wherewithal to construct them. It turned out that they don’t need them!

Between Accra and Kumasi, I did not encounter a single, private, non-commercial vehicle. I did not pass one; none passed me. I did not encounter any on-coming one either. And why didn’t I see private vehicles on that highway? Could it be because there aren’t that many private vehicles in Ghana to start with? Remember, Ghana has a ten-year age restriction on private car importation! And it charges relatively high tariffs on those that are qualified for importation.  So, you’d really be doing well if you own a private vehicle in Ghana.

All I saw were commercial buses…you know…the luxurious ones…your typical Ekene Dili Chukwu bus; except that these bore names such as V.I.P or BOSS. I saw some regular taxis and Tro-tro (mini bus). And I saw some trailers too. I passed six of them, four of which bore the Burkina Faso license plates. (Why would Burkina Faso send trailers down to Accra? Hmmmm…Burkina Faso is a landlocked country. It must be using the ports at Tema and Takoradi for its maritime shipments!)

Without being directed, Ghanaians are investing in mass transportation which reduces road accidents and the kind of stress you experience when those churches on the Lagos-Ibadan express decide to do their thing. Two of the V.I.P. buses that followed me right out of Accra were driving so fast that I struggled to lose them. I was doing about 130 k/h and they were right behind me. What does that tell you? Four and a half-hours doing an average of 130 k/h on a face-me-I-face-you road should tell you that the road was good. With fewer vehicles on the highway, the roads don’t degrade that fast.

It appeared more Ghanaians opt for travel by the mass transit system (the bus) because the cost of fuel in Ghana is prohibitive. I fill up my SUV in Ghana with roughly the same amount of money I used to fill it up in Los Angeles! A liter of petrol is GHC 4.67 (approx.. $1), which is equivalent to N360! A gallon (approx.. 4 liters) of petrol in Los Angeles as of this month is about $4.19. Do the math and see if it is not cheaper for you to ride the luxurious bus than put your kelu-kelu on the highway.

On getting to Kumasi, I spent two hours driving around and taking in everything. Kumasi seemed bigger and busier than Accra. If you removed the government offices in Accra, and you discounted the Greater Accra area, Kumasi is actually bigger. With more factories and a population of 2 million, it certainly bests Accra’s 1.7 million.

And that was where things started to get serious for me. Still on the N6, I left Kumasi and headed north to Techiman where I had planned to spend the night. Again, the road was good. It was better than the Accra-Kumasi leg, of course, because traffic was lighter on it. I didn’t encounter any trailer or luxurious bus in the two hours it took to get to Techiman. I started to wonder if there was any commerce going on between Techiman and Kumasi. All those trailers I had seen the day before…did they all stop at Kumasi? In the town, supposedly a major town, I didn’t see anything spectacular. I didn’t see any sign of ostentation; no flashy cars, no mansions…nothing. I just saw petty traders. I saw a lot of people doing nothing…just loafing around.

Things really got worse once I left Techiman the next morning and headed northeasterly on the N10 to Tamale. Yes…that same Tamale about which most Nigerians have heard a lot! Again, the road was great, save for a 15 kilometers stretch just before Bulpe, crossing over the White Volta River. After that, it was great all the way to Tamale. The vegetation changed. Gone were the farms - the banana plantations, the cashew plantations, the pawpaw, the mangoes, and the yams. Everything I saw south of Kumasi was now gone. I was in grassland…the kind of vegetation you’d see as you approach Ilorin from Ogbomosho. The weather was hotter. The villages were fewer and farther in-between. Mode of dressing changed. Now I was seeing veils and longer robes on women. I started to see mosques. And more mosques.

I got to Tamale after about five hours. I was only going to drive through because my rest destination was Bolgatanga. If you picture Tamale as Nigeria’s Bauchi, in terms of geographical location, Bolgatanga will be like Nigeria’s Maiduguri. Bolgatanga was just a 20-minute drive to Paga, the border with Burkina Faso in the northeastern part of Ghana.

From Tamale, things just went downhill drastically. Although the road (N10) was still great, even greater than what I had experienced so far, it seemed like I was in a vast land of nothingness. I drove for two good hours and did not encounter any (ANY) vehicle on the highway. I didn’t pass any vehicle; none passed me. Of course, there were police checkpoints throughout the journey. But on this stretch of the highway, I was by myself pretty much. At one point, I pulled over to check my map again, wondering if I was still in Ghana. This was a little past 1 pm and I was by myself on a highway! Needless to say that I was now safely doing about 140 k/h. You could place the vehicle on cruise control set to 140 k/h and hold it there for 15 minutes! Yes, the road was that good.

The topography was plains…flat land. You could see miles and miles with little obstruction. If I thought Tamale was hot, I was now practically in a furnace. This was considerably hotter than the Arizona desert. And I know the Arizona desert very well. The trees begged for a drop of water. Nothing flew. No birds. No butterflies. No flies! Can you believe that? But at each village, I saw children…young children. And I wondered how the people made those children in that heat; in those huts and under those thatched roofs! We are indeed spoiled in the Accra metropolis. I saw the very definition of poverty and deprivation.  For long stretches, there was stark absence of government. No schools. No hospitals. Nothing.

But there was no shortage of mosques. I didn’t know there were that many Muslims in Ghana. How in the world did they manage to not be stigmatized as a Muslim country like Nigeria is? I was struggling to find churches, just so I could report in this piece (because I knew I was going to write about it) that there were Christians in northern Ghana as well. I started counting mosques and churches. After the 50th mosque without a single church, I stopped counting. Then all of a sudden, I saw a Something-Something Pentecostal Church signboard (can’t remember the full name) as I approached a village. I slowed down so I could take a picture. When I got to it, the church was so small it was covered by its signboard! I couldn’t take a clear shot. You could barely fit six people in the church!

There were also donkeys. O Lord, there were donkeys! I grew up in Zaria and spent some of my childhood in Kano and Jos. I never saw nearly half as many donkeys in those places as I saw in northern Ghana. I saw all kinds of creative combinations of donkey-mobiles: donkeys by themselves grazing leisurely; donkeys tied to stakes on dry, arid land; donkeys mating (seemed like more than half of the donkeys I saw was about to start the process of mating or already in the act; donkey being ridden by one person; donkey being ridden by two people; donkey being ridden by three people; donkey carrying a load and going by itself in the wilderness (how it knew the way home, I don’t know); donkey carrying a load and being ridden too; donkey pulling a cart; two donkeys pulling one big cart. I mean, after seeing my first few donkeys, I couldn’t help but search for that Ebenezer Obey’s ketekete song in my music collection. If I got N10 for every donkey I encountered in northern Ghana, I would be a billionaire. Was this the counterculture to which Fashola wanted us to compare Nigeria?

Then I saw cattle. The closer I got to Burkina Faso, the more cattle I saw. And these were huge cattle. Curiously though, none of the herders (I am told they were Fulani) carried any weapon more potent than a cutlass. Most just carried sticks. No slinging of AK-47s. One Regional Police chief was reported to have recently issued a shoot-at-sight order to his men and women if they came across any Fulani herdsmen armed with a gun. It appeared to me that somehow, in the bushes where they lived, the herdsmen got the news. And they complied. I was specifically looking for weapons so I could compare with Nigerian Fulani herdsmen. The ones in Ghana respected Ghanaian laws. About three hours after leaving Tamale, I got to Bolgatanga and spent the night there.

The next morning, I drove into Burkina Faso, all the way north to Ouagadougou before turning southwesterly to Leo, near the northcentral border with Ghana.  I re-entered Ghana just past Leo and headed southward. It was dirt road. In fact, I had spent the last three and half hours on dirt roads in Burkina Faso. Dirt roads linking major towns! (I will probably write about Burkina Faso one day.)  I continued southward to Tumu, still on dirt road, following the road as it hugged the Gbele Game Production Reserve until I hit civilization on the N12 highway. That took me southward to Wa where I spent the night. This Bolgatanga-Ouagadougou-Wa leg turned out to be the most challenging aspect of the trip mainly because I had driven for more than eight hours on dirt, desolate and dangerous roads. The next day, I drove southward from Wa, back through Techiman to Kumasi where I spent the night. And finally, from Kumasi, I made the quick dash back to Accra.

All the towns I mentioned – Cape Coast, Takoradi, Techiman, Tamale, Bolgatanga and Wa – would only pass for towns. None of them was bigger than Oyo, Ilesha or Zaria. And they had nothing in them other than schools - hardly any big factories, hardly any big companies. Three of the four petrol attendants that sold fuel to me in the north had ONDs. One had HND. There was no job anywhere and they did not have any relatives in Accra or Kumasi, so they proudly took the fuel dispenser job at home. If the level of poverty seen along the highway was this much, how worse would it be in those communities hidden from view? It was as if the country concentrated everything it had in Accra. Only Accra and Kumasi would pass for cities in my estimation, each of them being just a bit smaller than Abeokuta or Ilorin.   

So, considering the foregoing, Fashola may be right that we are blessed in Nigeria. But he is dead wrong for perpetuating the notion that because Ghana, Niger, Rwanda, Benin and Togo are “inferior” to Nigeria, we should just sit there and continue to bask in the worn-out “Giant of Africa” appellation. I know the job of leading Nigerians can be quite overwhelming. But our leaders must remain undaunted. Any leader constrained by the overwhelming weight of his job to dream big things will ultimately stultify his people’s desire for growth. He will lose motivation. He will lose energy. He will lose commitment. He will settle for less…settle into narratives that glorify subpar performances and the romanticization of retrogression. Why not compare us to Germany, United Kingdom, United States of America, Canada, South Korea, Japan, or Hong Kong?   

While he was busy poo-pooing Ghana’s 3000 megawatts of electricity for its 28 million people, I can report that for more than 13 straight months now, my generator in Accra has not been fired up to power my home. The few times it came on, it was because the maintenance crew was there to service it. Around the third month of uninterrupted electricity, I thought okay…maybe it was just my neighborhood that got lucky. I asked some Ghanaian co-workers and some of my Nigerian friends and acquaintances who lived in other parts of the city. They reported same steady, albeit more expensive power supply.

If you dismiss Ghana’s steady electricity supply as inconsequential, would you dismiss its steady supply of fuel too as a fluke? Since I have been living in Ghana, I have never encountered a queue at any filling station. Nigerian leaders should get off their high horses and go to Ghana to learn how they are doing it. I know for a fact Ghanaians are paying a lot for electricity…more than four times what we pay in Nigeria. I know they collect EVERY single electricity bill. (You can’t owe electricity bill in Ghana. It’s just like in the Western world.) I know they aggressively prosecute and severely punish saboteurs of their electricity generation and distribution. And I know they deal mercilessly with all embezzlers of their money. We can do it too in Nigeria if we are committed, not minding whose ox is gored.

By Abiodun Ladepo

Ibadan, Oyo State

[email protected]