An open letter to former President John Dramani Mahama

Dear Mr. President,

I am writing to you at this particular time because I believe that in less than a month, the good people of Ghana will once more give you the sacred responsibility, trust, and the opportunity to be their president. I want to be one of the first people to express my profound appreciation to you for your high level of humility, phlegmatic heart, godliness, and abled leadership, which saw your first tenure in office as one of the most tolerant and vision-driven in the history of Ghana. I am grateful that in the heat of the 2020 elections, when after the polls the results were at their cliff-end, you never for a flinch of time chose to put your interest above that of the good people of Ghana, even when, at the time, some of us, including my very self, thought that you should never concede but ward off perceptions of vote rigging which dogged the 2020 elections. In time, you have proven to us all that you have chosen peace instead of strife and that you are a dutiful leader full of wisdom and compassion for your people.

Mr. President, I am a first-generation university graduate from a family in the Volta region. I always joke that I went to basic school with goats and sheep, and often, people do not understand. Indeed, I attended primary school in a remote village that lacked electricity at the time, and the education received was in a thatch-roofed, dilapidated mud house often left at the mercy of torrential rain. Our classrooms were without closed doors and windows, and when we were dismissed from school, goats and sheep would also go in there and attend theirs, too, defecating everywhere. Such was my humble beginning, and I felt it was a sacred obligation entrusted to everyone who has been a product of this type of education to make it a lifelong commitment to provide a better opportunity for successive generations to have access to quality education and decent job opportunities thereafter.

Mr. President, your leadership has provided one of the best responses to progressive access to quality education in Ghana. Your Community Day School program has seen the construction of over fifty ultramodern secondary schools across Ghana and has also provided well-fitted computer and simulation labs. Consequently, the focal point of my letter to you is to thank you, Mr. President, for your commitment to education in Ghana, but most importantly, to appeal to you to give further the most necessary attention that you can give to education in Ghana without which someone like me, from a typical remote village, would not have found myself at where I am today.

Your Excellency, those of us who have lived and, or heard about the tiny state of Massachusetts in the United States and its rich history know so well and understand that quality education that leads to a

productive human capital is far more critical to the development of a nation than the abundance of natural resources such as gold, cocoa, and crude oil! With its numerous schools, hospitals, and cutting-edge biotechnology companies, Massachusetts, the tiny Bay state that is the seventh smallest state in America in terms of landmass, ranks in national polls consistently as one of the richest and with the most educated workforce. The state of Massachusetts is so successful that some describe it as the wonder of America!

This is mainly because even though the state has no abundant natural resources in these contemporary times to rely on, it has committed to heavy investment in education and research and refused to feed on the remains of foreign harvests! In his glorious tribute to Massachusetts as the citadel of prosperity and abundance, Horace Mann, who I will call in the Ghanaian context the Kwegyir Aggrey of America, rhetorically quizzed, “Whence, then, I again ask, comes her wealth? One copious, exhaustless fountain supplies all this abundance. It is education,--the intellectual, moral, and religious education of the people. Having no other mines to work, Massachusetts has mined into the human intellect, and, from its limitless resources, she has won more sustaining and enduring prosperity and happiness than if she had been founded on a stratification of silver and gold, reaching deeper down than geology has yet penetrated.”

Mr. President, I remember, while I was a student at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, in the year 2014, that you were a keynote speaker at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, and after you spoke about the future of Africa and Ghana’s contributions to the continent’s growth and prosperity, you took time off your busy schedule to have breakfast with us the Ghanaian students in the Greater Boston Community and also took questions from us. Your response about your commitment to creating employment opportunities for graduate youths remains in my mind. Therefore, I would be pleased to start my humble requests to you that when, by God’s grace, you assume office in January of 2025, you stick to your commitment to creating job opportunities for a large number of youth, including graduates of tertiary institutions in Ghana, who are without any meaningful and sustainable source of livelihood.

Mr. President, I know that this has been your headache as well, especially now that you crisscross the country to appeal to the conscience of our people for votes, the majority of who, unfortunately, are youths who have lost every sense of hope in Ghana’s successive governments. On my part, I witnessed the same. I wept bitterly when, during my tacit but memorable campaign for a Member of Parliament seat in the North Dayi district of the Volta region, I saw with my naked eyes the extent to which people as young as twenty years have had their lives entirely stolen away from them. At the same time, these youth live in the abyss of hopelessness and despair as though they are not even a part of the Ghana you and I so much love and cherish.

Mr. President, there have been some responses from successive governments on how to solve the menace of graduate unemployment. To this end, your political opponents rolled out what they called Planting for Food and Jobs. While I am not here to say that the program has failed or succeeded, I can say that such programs are not rooted in sustainability! I have yet to see a government that is totally and fully dedicated to the problem of graduate unemployment in Ghana. I do not want to believe that a program such as Planting for Food and Jobs would provide adequate and sustainable jobs to many students from our academic institutions when we continue to chunk graduates out like they were produced in a corn mill yet have no plan in place to prepare them and also provide for their job opportunities.

Mr. President, while some of us are of the view that our universities and technical universities have not had the best form of partnership with industry to tailor their programs to the growing needs of the job market, the systemic problem remains that the sectors we so much refer to are few and more so largely expatriate, therefore, government as a catalyst must play a unique role to stimulate not only the job market but gel together our academic institutions and these industry players to work hand in hand even to the extent of offering through partnership agreements paid and non-paid internship, externship positions, direct entry, and even fellowships to our numerous students and recent graduates to secure them a future.

Mr. President, I know this is possible because of my experience with the American education system. In a government that knows so well that the capacity of her youth to acquaint themselves not only jobs but cutting edge knowledge and expertise that are needed for her to remain in a globally competitive market as the vanguard of creativity and innovation, the American government through its federal agencies have put in place pathway internships, fellowships, and volunteer opportunities in both federal agencies and participatory private sector jobs that students and recent graduates are continually trained, offered jobs, and even some offered start-up capital to start their businesses. I do not doubt that your government can lay a solid foundation for such programs in the education sector. However, in your efforts to do that, the process must be a-political and such that beneficiaries would be drawn mainly from a pool of your appointees, party loyalists, and their families and cronies, as is the case in the public sector in Ghana now.

Mr. President, my niece recently graduated from one of the public Junior High schools in Accra. I would describe her performance in the Basic Education Certificate Examination as excellent, having ace all her subjects. Yet, when it was time for secondary school admission, she could not obtain admission in her first and second choices through the electronic posting system. Instead, I was told the computer sent her to a school in a remote part of Volta North. Concerned as I became, I began to dig into what

might have taken place. To make matters worse, every contact person I encountered at Ghana Education Service advised that I paid money for a fast-track school change for my niece in the computerized system. Several of her classmates who are fortunate to have parents who could pay had already done so. Right from an initial placement in a grade C school in Volta North, some have secured placement to Adisadel College and Mfatsipim school for their wards with grades and total aggregate far worse than my niece’s! Mr. President, imagine that as a parent, your ward and others sit in the same classroom, and some of their classmates do not have even half extemporaneous of her intelligence and academic prowess. Yet, because of the lack of money, she would end up in a grade C school while her other colleagues would end up in a grade A school, simply because their parents have money to pay for the system to be manipulated in their favor! This is the absolute truth about what has become an existential threat to the future and sustainability of our second-cycle education system in Ghana.

Mr. President, I am saddened that, though dressed in another uniform, the nepotism, cronyism, and favoritism displayed at our various state institutions regarding employment is even more glaring and thus poisonous to the country's future. Indeed, when one goes about collecting a poll right now concerning workers in all the various ministries in Ghana, it will be found out that more than a third of governmental employees working in the ministries in Ghana, for instance, find themselves in their current positions as a result of their connection to the corridor of power! This practice precludes classless people from any meaningful chance of entrance and ascendancy in the public sector. In essence, your commitment to solving graduate unemployment may not be realized without your corresponding response of dislodging favoritism, nepotism, and cronyism in Ghana's public sector employment process that has become a calcified way of life for years.

I do not want to believe this is the future for which poor but hard-working parents like my parents believed and toiled for, selling their lands and valuables to see us through school; I do not want to believe that this was the precedence of cronyism, favoritism, and nepotism displayed by the founding fathers of Massachusetts that made her to be hailed so loudly today by all and sundry! This wickedness and vindictiveness must stop! I challenge you, Mr. President, to set up an abled-bodied team that would help bring to action executive instruments and guidelines capable of discouraging and then punishing individuals and their collaborators who would want to continue to take advantage of the public sector employment process and for that matter jeopardize the lives of the future leaders of our country Ghana.

Mr. President, I know that you love Ghana with passion. I have trust in your abilities, and I know that this your second term in office is about duty, service, and honor! It is about working so hard to benefit Ghana and her citizenry so that your legacy as one of the best, if not the best, presidents to have emerged from Sub-Saharan Africa will be firmly rooted, and your name will continually linger in the

chambers of the minds of future generations. Therefore, as the president, I hope that your government will dislodge this system of meritocracy in Ghana and create an innovative process to respond to graduate unemployment in Ghana and provide equal opportunities for every graduate in public sector employment. At the same time, may you commit yourself to your agenda of progressive access to quality education in Ghana. May spring be borne under your bright steps!

Manaseh Mawufemor Mintah

Manaseh@brandeis.edu

The writer is a PhD research fellow living in Boston, Massachusetts.