When certainty becomes the problem: What the Holy Quran says to Ghana's ruling class

Day 24 | Ramadan Knowledge Series

The Quran identifies genuine scholars by the awe they carry, not the confidence they project. Ghana's civil service standoff reveals what happens when institutions mistake the signing of an agreement for the completion of an obligation.

Quranic verse: (Surah Fatir, 35:28)

“Indeed, those who fear Allah from among His servants are the scholars.”

On 9 March 2026, more than 60,000 civil servants across Ghana withdrew their services. The Civil and Local Government Staff Association of Ghana, CLOGSAG, began an indefinite strike over a salary structure the government had negotiated, formalised through two separate Memoranda of Understanding, and failed to implement. Implementation was first scheduled for 1 January 2023, then rescheduled to 1 January 2025. Neither date was honoured. The National Labour Commission declared the action illegal on 11 March and summoned CLOGSAG to a hearing. The association did not appear. Ministries, departments, and agencies remain closed as of today. This dispute has been simmering since 2019.

Surah Fatir links genuine scholarship to awe, specifically the awe that comes from understanding enough to recognise how much remains unknown. Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher, recorded the same observation in his Pensées: those who engage most deeply with any complex subject grow more conscious, not less, of what lies beyond their current grasp. Pascal identified this not as a deficiency but as the mark of honest inquiry. A scholar who becomes certain has, in that moment, stopped learning. A government that signs without accounting for what it does not know has already planted its next crisis.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research on mastery and what he called flow states established that practitioners who reach genuine depth in any field simultaneously develop a sharper sense of the subject's inexhaustibility.

Mastery and humility emerge from the same process. The CLOGSAG dispute demonstrates the inverse: an institution that entered its commitments with higher confidence than the complexity of those commitments warranted, and then found itself unable to explain, year after year, why implementation had not moved.

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026 identifies this pattern at the global scale. Governing institutions worldwide are compounding crises precisely because they entered commitments without building in the mechanisms to acknowledge uncertainty, revise timelines honestly, and communicate with those affected by delays. The report describes institutions gridlocked not by complexity alone but by the epistemic posture that preceded the gridlock: the confidence that made adaptation feel unnecessary. Ghana's situation with CLOGSAG is a domestic instance of a globally documented institutional failure, visible here in the specific gap between what was signed and what was delivered across three successive implementation deadlines.

The hearing at the National Labour Commission on 18 March is the immediate test. Compliance with the Commission's directive is a legal minimum. What the situation requires is something the verse from Surah Fatir and Pascal's Pensées both point toward: an institutional reckoning with what the government does not yet fully know about its own capacity to implement what it has agreed. Seven years of engagement produced promises rather than implementation. The worker who withdrew their services on 9 March was communicating, through absence, that confidence without delivery compounds into a form of institutional dishonesty from which recovery is difficult.