Have you seen the Netflix film “Focus”? In it, Will Smith and his team trick some guy into making a certain decision by putting cues in his entire day that makes him believe he is supposed to choose what he chose. Well let’s just say I’ve been coming across “change the system” type of messages in my life the past month or so, and that’s why I’m finally writing this.
About 2 weeks ago, I was part of a workshop type thing for work, and we had a masterclass on Systems Thinking. Then we had another session where our CEO (that's not him in the picture btw) basically shared his life’s story with us, and somewhere in the story, he dropped a couple of life lessons hinting on how we’re a product of the systems we operate in. But why I am finally writing about this is because yesterday, it came up in a book I am currently reading from a personal development perspective, but I realized the lesson extended beyond personal development.
People who don’t have goals in society are said to be planning to fail. But it’s clear and obvious that not everyone who has goals achieves them or are successful. The current president of Ghana had a lot of goals of vision for what he would do if he became president. Is that what we’re seeing after his 4 years of tenure? Did he not have goals and vision? What went wrong then?
He wants to see change without changing anything. In the statement I just made, “change” is the result he wants, and “anything” is the system we’re working with in Ghana. If you don’t change anything, you can’t change anything. This is to both political parties and citizens alike.
There are constituencies who only see their Members of Parliaments once or twice in their 4-year tenure: when elections are due. Then they run back home with puppy eyes acting like they’re sympathizers of the people. And my people oh my people. My people will excuse their 4 years of incompetency because they gave them a sweet speech full of promises, bought their team matching jerseys, dashed them a 100 cedis gas cylinder, bought a couple of people bikes, or whatever their stupid bribe is. We don’t vet the politicians we vote. We listen to their lies and we vote if we get something personal from them. This is the voting habit and system we have.
And rightfully so, politicians see their campaigns as investments that need to be paid back with profits when they come into office. And it’s blood-boiling that these very same politicians on top of the fat salaries they receive, pay for nothing! But in the eyes of our government, paying them as much as they’re paid is only right is only right and justified as opposed to allocating some resources to making sure that galamsey doesn’t poison the waters and kill the citizens whose only request is for their natural water bodies to be protected from illegal miners.
As for the corruption in the country, well that’s nothing. Everyone is corrupt and the government does not care to do a thing because they’re complicit in the corruption as well. People are getting paid for non-existent jobs, unqualified people are working jobs that you need to be a master at your craft to perform, our politicians are giving themselves scholarships meant for underprivileged citizens. The corruption runs so deep that now you can’t even trust medical professionals with your life anymore because your nurse can not construct a complex sentence, and struggles to differentiate between pronouns.
What to do?
If you want to kill a tree, you don’t prune it cos the branches will just grow back. Instead, you sever its grounding at the roots, cutting off its access to essentials like water and nutrients. This is how to deal with systemic problems.
Ghana’s issue is not just with politicians, it’s with the way we all think. If the country will ever return to its former glory, it will take mindset shifts at the most basic levels to get there. The challenges we’re facing is like a hydra- you remove one corrupt person, two even more corrupt people will likely replace them. So instead of changing the people, would it not be wiser to change the system that created them instead?
The one system they all went through. That we all went through.
One thing that is common among all the people in government and we citizens is that regardless of religion or ethnic group or whatever, we all passed through the same educational system. Maybe that gives us reason to question the quality and credibility of our educational system, don’t you think?
In one of the masterclasses I mentioned earlier, one of the panelists opened by asking us what the relevance of education was. You know what happened? Utter silence. Because people knew inherently that the primary purpose of education was not to get them jobs, and that forced them to reckon with the embarrassing truth that they grappled with understanding what use their education is.
At some point during this masterclass, I had an “aha” moment – perhaps, an educational/curriculum reform is what we need to steer the course of the country back on track. Surprising, about two days later, we had a different masterclass with the CEO of T-TEL, a non-profit dedicated to transforming Teaching, Education and Learning and he gave us some promising updates of the curriculum they’ve been working on intensely this year which would be rolling out this coming semester. Unlike the one we have now, this one will pay more attention to not just academics, but also imbibing students with the Ghanaian values that will make them responsible citizens and leaders and people who we will be confident in leading the country to glory.
Every generation that has preceded mine have said they failed the country. It seems like my generation will say it too, but I pray that the next won’t. But what they’ll say, depends on whether we as a country and as a people can change our educational system to reflect the changes we want to see.
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