My Shame as a Ghanaian

Every Sunday, I go to Regent's Park to play football with members of London Business School's Men's Football Club. The park is public so sometimes, people who come to the park looking for a pick-up game join us when we're short.

A couple of Sundays ago, a Ghanaian joined us during our kick-about. Cue the exuberance when one Ghanaian meets another Ghanaian in a place very few Ghanaians frequent. His name was Martin, and he spoke in the patented English accent with an easily discernible undercurrent of a Ghanaian accent. We chatted as we passed the ball back and forth between us. All of a sudden, "You know, if you meet any of the guys here who can't do their work, let me know; I know a guy who has been through all of this, and he can help, innit." He continued: "Because, you know, sometimes, some of the people just can't do the work, innit." He didn't say it, but his tone implied "for a small fee."

Martin felt comfortable enough to propose this idea to me after barely five minutes of meeting me because I'm Ghanaian. I'm convinced he wouldn't have suggested this to a white Englishman he'd only just met.

Ghanaian culture is inherently socialist (if you can read the word without the negative baggage it carries in the West) and populated by people with natural capitalist (read: selfish) instincts. Everybody is their brother's keeper; we look out for each other. We'll make a quick cedi out of it, wherever we can, but in general, one of our underlying instincts is to play benefactor. The problem with this is that we don't know where to draw the line. We don't know when helping a brother out morphs into providing an unfair advantage to one person, probably at the expense of another, definitely to the detriment of our community as a whole. It is this flaw in our ethos that dogs the fight against corruption. In everyday life, the administrator at the DVLA is unable to process that giving an unqualified driver a license in exchange for "something small" is probably going to lead to someone getting killed on the road. The headmaster as St. Augustine's does not figure that admitting the underqualified son of his old classmate compromises the chance of some unlucky kid to get the quality of education they earned.

You don't know what you don't know. To eliminate corruption, you have to be aware of how it manifests itself, especially in the subtle ways. I'm no angel, and I know I've contributed to this in the past. The first (and arguably most important) trick to beating corruption within society is to identify how we contribute to it, in our own small ways.