In a 2018 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC ) article, Elizabeth Ohene, a former Ghanaian government official during the 2000–2008 regime of President John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana, discusses how in Ghana, the cultural expectation is that the citizenry must be late for both formal and informal events whether in business or in governance.
Ohene discusses the mayhem and embarrassment that emerged when as a presidential staffer, she tried to ensure that President Kufuor will get to functions that he had been invited to on time. Interestingly, no one was prepared for a timely Ghanaian president and no one expected President Kufuor to be on time for these functions. It was unprecedented for Ghanaian leaders to be on time, so foreign diplomats and Ghanaians alike were rattled by the president’s promptness. The commencement of functions attended by the president were therefore chaotic, as unprepared hosts, foreign and local, faced a president who was on time but was not expected to be on time.
Tardiness or the inability to be timely is just one of the several traits of Ghanaians that can be argued to undermine productivity. In fact, Adei and Armah (2018) reported that Ghana’s economy, especially the public sector, suffered severely from low productivity. They noted that despite being a significantly smaller neighbor and one of the smallest countries in Africa, Togo’s public sector was significantly much more productive than Ghana’s. Productivity-sapping traits are clearly considered in a negative light, and there appears to be several other negative productivity-sapping traits that plague Ghanaians as identified by Huntington (2000).
Huntington (2000) chanced across and compared data from Ghana and South Korea in the early 1970s. He was struck by the similarity in the structures of the economies of these independent developing countries in terms of income per capita as measured by real GDP per capita, the severity of inflation, size of population, types of exports and level of foreign aid received and so on.
However, when he compared the same two countries several years later in the 1990s, he found that while South Korea had metamorphosed into an industrialized, first world country, Ghana had barely changed. South Korea’s GDP per capita was now 15 times greater than that of Ghana. This observation encouraged Huntington to comment, in surprising endorsement of Max Webber’s (1930) Protestant ethic that “while South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization, and discipline, Ghanaians had different values” (Huntington 2000). Huntington attributed the difference in performance to a difference in culture .
Huntington (2000) argued that culture matters and the main reason for Ghana’s developmental struggle was a perverse culture that did not enhance wealth creation. In contrast, South Korean culture emphasized and valued pro-market wealth creation values like “education, investment, thrift, hard work, organization, and discipline.” This enabled South Korea to forge ahead and grow rapidly while Ghana was held back by cultural values that were antimarket and counterproductive.
According to Claros and Perotti (2014) the issue with Huntington’s (2000) honest but politically incorrect statement is that it suggests that Ghanaians live beyond their means, are indolent, ignorant, disorganized and undisciplined.
Even if true, such a statement will fail to elicit a useful conversation with Ghanaian leaders about how to replicate Korea’s success (Heffner 2002). This may be even more relevant if, instead of culture, the actual drag on development is some other factor that is correlated with both culture and development or just appears to be cultural in nature.
Irrespective of Huntington’s (2000) observations and conclusions about Ghana, what may also be true is that culture is dynamic not static so just because Huntington noticed a culture in Ghana that was not supportive of wealth creation at the time he wrote his observations does not mean that Ghanaians’ culture is set in stone and cannot adapt to change. I am in no way claiming that Huntington (2000) implied Ghana was doomed to poverty and mediocrity because of its perverse culture, but it is worth noting that culture can change based on external influences such as globalization and education and in response to competing values and effective leadership.
Further, although, like Huntington, I am a firm believer that culture matters, and I do think that culture explains, at least in part, some of Ghana’s developmental challenges, a comparison of the trajectory of South Korean and Ghanaian development, subsequent to Huntington’s (2000) comments, casts at least a little doubt on, though it does not discredit, Huntington’s (2000) hypothesis that culture was the primary factor holding Ghana back from achieving its developmental objectives.
Culture was, and probably still is, a major drag on Ghana’s development, but there are probably a myriad of other factors as well responsible for Ghana’s below par performance that Huntington observed. This fact is in some ways illustrated by what has happened to Ghana and South Korea subsequent to Huntington’s writings.
From 1992 to 2018, the real GDP per capita of Ghana’s economy has expanded faster than 5% on a year-ago basis for the entire 26 years achieving world record growth rates of 14% in 2011 following the discovery of oil in Ghana. Ghana’s GDP per capita which was 15 times lower than South Korea’s GDP at the time Huntington was writing is still 15 times smaller than South Korea’s GDP today.
On the surface the fact that Ghana GDP per capita is still 15 times smaller than South Korea’s in 2019, exactly like it was a generation ago in the 1990s, appears to confirm Huntington’s (2000) implied hypothesis that Ghanaian culture did not value pro-market wealth creation attributes like investment , hard work , education , and organization. The chain of events subsequent to Huntington’s observation, however, masks a lot of dynamism in Ghana’s, South Korea’s and the global economy from the 1990s to the 2100s.
A hypothetical example will make things clear. Recall that the GDP per capita of South Korea was already substantially large in the 1990s compared to Ghana. If Ghana’s economy were initially much smaller and stalling because of perverse cultural factors, Ghana’s average incomes will be significantly lower than South Korean incomes at the present times instead of maintaining a constant phase difference with it.
Rather, what has happened since the 1990s is that even though both Ghanaian and South Korean GDP are both significantly higher in real terms than they were a generation ago, Ghanaian incomes have quadrupled while South Korean incomes have only doubled at best. Further, there has been the emergence of a new middle class in Ghana with access to first world facilities including the latest malls, high-rise buildings, gated apartment communities, new stadia, airport and rail systems.
Clearly, Ghanaians retain some, if not most, of the negative cultural traits that Huntington noticed and documented. However, Ghanaians do have several positive traits as well such as a love for foreigners, tribal, religious and political tolerance, an entrepreneurial spirit, often inhibited by a lack of access to capital, significant and palpable media freedom, and a genuine interest in sustaining the peace which must in some way account for some of the moderate progress the country has made recently. In f...