Even in our own land we are denied jobs

I have been wondering if we have anything to live for as a people.

When you travel out of Ghana, you realised you are the least in everything. It does not really matter how educated you are. You are only offered what others refuse from jobs to anything under the sun. The reason based on the colour of your skin and your place of birth. I know many thousands of my contemporaries in Britain and America, Canada and even South Africa who cannot get even menial jobs with degrees and trades they worked hard to earn.

Surprisingly enough, even in our own country we are discriminated against when it comes to job opportunities. Send out application in response to any top job and you will see how the colonial past is still ingrained in the minds of our leaders who think that anything white is the best. Your application will find its way into the dustbin.

I have been able to use pseudonyms with the same qualifications, grades but with the name of non-existent Universities and Colleges and was invited for interviews I wouldn?t have been invited to with my real name and the name of the schools I attended.

Therefore, if we cannot even access low level and middle level jobs in our won land and from our won people for the benefit of our own economy, then what business do our leaders have to be telling us to stay in the country. To stay in Ghana and be jobless?

They will always point to one Blackman or a Ghanaian somewhere to bolster their point that they not selective and racist in their mode of recruitment. That will definitely discourage you from going further. But take a look at the number of representation per hundred or so people; take their educational attainments into account; take other aspects of their backgrounds into account and the picture will be more clearer to you. You will realise that it is not because you are less qualified than those who are offered what you are all competing for but because of whom you are.

It is an undeniable fact that from the lowest to the highest echelons of our society, political, social, cultural and economical; we still wallow in the belief that anything foreign is better than our own, as they have taught us to believe, and this attitude is really killing us.

It is therefore necessary that the complaint by the Rig Workers Association of Ghana must be taken serious and investigated further for the truth to be brought to light.

Martin Richardson
Struggling Ghanaian
Johannesburg

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