Governments don't care about innovation and creative minds - Futurist Kwame

Futurist Kwame, a leading voice on technology and innovation, has opened up on the challenges of driving technological growth in countries like Ghana and the reasons why governments tend to resist innovative ideas.

Kwame argued that governments, by nature, resist innovation because it disrupts the status quo, which often benefits certain groups entrenched in systems of corruption and inefficiency.

"Governments by their very nature are anti-innovation," Kwame stated. "The reason is because innovation destroys the status quo. Once it disrupts the status quo, you have people who have vested interests in maintaining that corruption, and you’re essentially taking food from their table," he added.

As an example of this phenomenon, Kwame highlighted the lack of progress in digitalizing Ghana’s passport and immigration system, despite the obvious advantages such a system would bring.

He explained that middlemen and intermediaries, who benefit from the current inefficient processes, block innovation because it would take away their unofficial earnings.

"We could have fully digitalized our passport and immigration system by now," Kwame explained. "When your passport expires, you could just go online, fill out the form, and have it printed and delivered to you. But no—there are hundreds of people in the chain who offer to do it for you in three days for 1,000 cedis. Those people are the ones preventing these innovations from happening," Kwame revealed.

Kwame also touched on the deeper reasons why governments resist innovations like cryptocurrency, citing it as a threat to their control over national currencies. He explained that governments rely heavily on their ability to control currency as part of their sovereignty.

"When it comes to money, it’s one of the major things that give governments sovereignty," he stated. "The moment individuals can create their own currency, it weakens the government’s control. That’s why they were so against cryptocurrency—it posed a direct threat to their ability to issue and regulate money," Kwame said.

Futurist Kwame also briefly commented on the unsuccessful launch of Freedom Coin, a private currency introduced by Ghanaian entrepreneur Nana Kwame Bediako, also known as Cheddar.

Although Kwame did not delve into specific details, he implied that the resistance to Cheddar’s currency mirrored the broader pushback against cryptocurrencies.

"The ordinary person should ask: why did they clamp down on one just to bring out the exact same thing?" Kwame pondered, leaving listeners to reflect on the contradictions between government actions and their goals.