The Sociocultural Mathematics of Growth

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• Grammar Police 12 years ago

  "These are the scrumptious ingredients Ghana and Africa needs for their salad of social and economic success."
  
  These are the scrumptious ingredients Ghana and Africa NEED for ... success.

  "These are the scrumptious ingredients Ghana and Africa needs for their salad of social and economic success."
  
  These are the scrumptious ingredients Ghana and Africa NEED for ... success.

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• Conventional Youth. 12 years ago

  Sire out desirable economic needs from the whole.

  Sire out desirable economic needs from the whole.

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• Asiwome 12 years ago

  Your article is good,but most of us feel that we have been let loose on unknown seas, "Creative individualism, or de-ethnicization, he believes, must be encouraged by any society which desires to be innovative." I don't belie ...
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  Your article is good,but most of us feel that we have been let loose on unknown seas, "Creative individualism, or de-ethnicization, he believes, must be encouraged by any society which desires to be innovative." I don't believe this at all.
  "We should encourage our people to break new frontiers and continue to challenge existing ways of doing things"
  The idea of a "village watch" means the community reinforces the values of parents not the other way around. We are encountering problems of conflicting cultures.
  "African social ethic is expressed in many maxims that emphasize the importance of the values of mutual helpfulness, collective responsibility, cooperation, interdependence, and reciprocal obligations” I agree with that, but if you asked an African he or she might attribute these characteristics to an NGO instead.
  "Sen’s creative individualism does describe a situation where the creativity of a “free” individual is not strangulated by official, bureaucratic, cultural, social, or political ignorance and bottlenecks."I agree with this also.
  "His radical views on India’s poor sanitation recalls.... We bring these questions to the fore because our own African situation is closely similar to India’s and China’s though we markedly differ in historical, developmental, national, and cultural characters." I disagree. We still sweep our compounds in the villages.
  The focus should not be on acquiring new ideas, it should be on improving old ones,e.g. we should not discard our kerosene lanterns until we are sure that we have an efficient electricity provider, also we must regulate the use of electrical appliances etc.
  The definition of individualism must include the ability own land. I have been told that civilization is made possible by Agriculture. You have mentioned a host of things that impede proper thinking, but the answer is in focusing on basic needs, manufacturing mosquito nets, digging wells,putting up structures from resources that we find in our backyards etc.
  It is a rather long article. Thank you.

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• Kojo T 12 years ago

  I enjoy reading your articles as they are positive and envigorating However you deal with multiple isues. Alaways take one at a time and develop it . In this one you could have used the social impact of the gains and losses o ...
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  I enjoy reading your articles as they are positive and envigorating However you deal with multiple isues. Alaways take one at a time and develop it . In this one you could have used the social impact of the gains and losses of brain drain/loss. That is the ipact. You are obviously an intelligent person but you should know a lot of us are not at your level . Good communication is getting your message accross. My suggestion is to work on that . your ideas are too important to fly over the bar . TX

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• francis kwarteng 12 years ago

  Good morning my brother Kojo T,
  
  Thanks for the comment. I shall do my best.

  Good morning my brother Kojo T,
  
  Thanks for the comment. I shall do my best.

  reply
• francis kwarteng 12 years ago

  Most of the ideas I suggested have to do with basic needs—safe water, drainage, getting rid of mosquitoes/malaria, eating well, electricity/sanitation (personal hygiene, etc), building physical infrastructure for children w ...
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  Most of the ideas I suggested have to do with basic needs—safe water, drainage, getting rid of mosquitoes/malaria, eating well, electricity/sanitation (personal hygiene, etc), building physical infrastructure for children who sit under trees to study, mutual respect, poverty reduction, good citizenship,
  Your suggestions are implied in my article: Getting rid of mosquitoes/malaria implies manufacturing mosquito nets, your digging wells (implied drainage systems and other such activities); etc. In fact, you merely restated many of my ideas using “different language.”
  Also, I said somewhere we need to get rid of retrogressive cultural ideas. These does not mean we should get rid of all our cultural ideas. To make my point clearer I cited some examples “trokosi” and “female genital mutilation.”
  Again, I said somewhere that we must give priority to African thoughts 9I should have said “progressive” African thoughts; the problem with me is that I hardly proofread my articles/essays. I had “progressive” in my heard but my fingers move faster on the keyboard than my thinking; this why typos and elisions abound in my writings. I must begin doing serious proofreading) in our humanities/liberal arts course.
  So, you see, I didn’t say we must focus all our energies on new ideas. I never said that anywhere. You may want to reread the article again. In fact, we need progressive new ideas as we need progressive (traditional) African ideas. Besides, like you implied, most of the ideas and materials we need are in our traditions and environment. Many Ghanaian/Africans buy imported diamond and gold rings, etc., for weddings, and the like. Yet much of these diamond and gold come from Africa.
  The problem is that we lack the technology to convert many of our raw materials into finished products. This is where I suggested we come up with radical technologies. I am not saying our local metallurgists (blacksmith or whatever appropriate names we have for them) are not doing a good job. They are. But we need a wider market for our local products. And that means we need technologies to make products to enhance our competitiveness in the global market. We need to expand our markets beyond Ghana and even beyond Africa. China has expanded its market to include Africa and the rest of the world. Why don’t we do the same?
  Japan and other foreigners come to our lands to exploit raw (natural) building materials for their construction industries, yet we fail to see value in them. Why?
  Thanks for your sharing your understanding and observations with us!

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• Kojo T 12 years ago

  What we need is mass production. kente weaving or gold smithing takes a long time for one article to get completed

  What we need is mass production. kente weaving or gold smithing takes a long time for one article to get completed

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• francis kwarteng 12 years ago

  Please do overlook the typos and grammatical errors….capitalization errors…inadvertent elisions, etc.
  I also made a few “subject-verb agreement errors. Examples: These are the scrumptious ingredients Ghana and Africa ...
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  Please do overlook the typos and grammatical errors….capitalization errors…inadvertent elisions, etc.
  I also made a few “subject-verb agreement errors. Examples: These are the scrumptious ingredients Ghana and Africa “needs” (should have been “need,” not “needs”)… Another one: Does the government of the source country, Ghana, for instance, “keeps tabs” (should have been “keep,” not “keeps”)…
  
  Of course, unless the acculturations he had undergone is so ferocious and deep as to completely cause him to lose his sense of “natural” (should have been “national”)…
  There are a few others I noticed this morning after responding to your comments (I had to go through the article again to respond to your comments). Bear with me, please! I have to learn to be a serious proofreader of my work (something I AM NOT).

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• francis kwarteng 12 years ago

  I hope we've all read the article "Italy boat disaster: Ghanaian team to identify nationals" or seen the news on TV. Some Ghanaian authors/journalists write all kinds of “glorified” stories about our “development.” Un ...
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  I hope we've all read the article "Italy boat disaster: Ghanaian team to identify nationals" or seen the news on TV. Some Ghanaian authors/journalists write all kinds of “glorified” stories about our “development.” Unfortunately, we hear these kinds of tragic stories involving our people now and then.
  This is what my articles, this very one and its prequel, have been saying all along. This is also why we have advised writers (and readers) to be skeptical of the “apocryphal” data some of these journalists feed us with. If you should get to know the kinds of jobs some of our “renowned” scholars and graduates do outside of Africa you’ll be shocked. Brain drain (or variants of it) is real! Many Ghanaian graduates have been involved in these tragedies.
  Please read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Things Around Your Neck,” a collection of short stories about “immigrant experiences.” Either on CNN’s African Faces or BBC’s African Voices, she discusses the experiences African immigrants go through in the West, particularly in America. The interviewer, a British-born Sierra Leonean, was shocked to learn some hard truths about “immigrant experiences.” She even told Adichie that people who read the book might think she Adichie doesn’t like America. Google the interview.
  The family of the dead ones should accept our condolences!

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