When President John Mahama mounted the stage at the recent 4th African Heritage Awards, he spoke–both as a concerned leader who meant well for the collective prosperity of Nigeria and Ghana, but he was also a rhetorician who trusted his audience to decipher the subtext of his presidential tongue-in-cheek: “If Nigeria does well, Ghana does well.
When you have cousins, 250 million of them, you want them to do well so that one million of them don’t come drifting towards a small country like Ghana”. The actual message to Nigeria was: Oga, you can’t be here.
Big house vs small hut
Most clever politicians are necessarily rhetoricians.
And by rhetoricians, we imagine some rare breed of powerful and persuasive speakers like Adolf Hitler, Barack Obama, and Martin Luther King Jr, who delighted us with their rhetorical brilliance, by saying ordinary things in beautiful language.
The truth, however, is that we are all rhetoricians. Marc Antony deployed rhetoric when he delivered the famous “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears…”
A teenager trying to convince her mother to approve a sleepover at her friend’s may not sound elegant, but she is at every point using Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle: Ethos (trust me; I am credible), Pathos (emotional connection), and Logos (logic; I am making sense).
Beyond Jollof and football rivalry, the Ghana-Nigeria relationship is built on the rhetorical triangle, too.
We slug it out in our WhatsApp groups and other digital platforms with different arguments about why African economies struggle to contain their citizens within their borders.
When the argument graduates to the apogee, we compare notes and decide who is the worst loser in the areas of corruption, insecurity, and fiscal policy mismanagement.
Often we deploy our ethos, pathos and logos to make superior arguments about why we love our countries and wish we had stronger economies, so we do not have to leave our borders to foreign lands.
When Ghanaians begin to ask questions about why a huge population of 250 million people cannot manage their vast natural resources, they are talking about the character and credibility of the people of Nigeria and the emotional connection we share as West African siblings.
Analysts have compared the Nigerian economic situation and their chronic inability to solve their electricity and internal security problems to an ambitious man who built the biggest house in the community, pretending to be rich, but ends up sneaking into the smaller huts of poor neighbours to feed his ego and pride. That is the Niaja paradox.
Ghana must go
Ghana and Nigeria are twins of the same mother, President Mahama told guests at the Heritage Awards.
We may not be identical twins but we know we have a few things in common until our accents and intonations tell us apart.
We tried to live and work together until one felt Ghana Must Go in 1983, perhaps as a retaliation to the Aliens Compliance Order in 1969.
We have since pretended to love each other, overlooking obvious pitfalls to promote our common interests.
But like a shrewd husband who took back a cheating wife, we know the romance is not organic.
We have put behind those sad days, but we have also had to deal with their apparitions in our current context. Before the recent influx of Nigerians into Ghana, there has always been concerns about the Nigerians in our midst and what it portended for Ghana.
Landlords have been uncomfortable renting their houses to Nigerians, as police raids of some quiet neighborhoods have usually flushed out Nigerians in criminal activity, especially cyber fraud and illicit drugs.
These Nigerians have mostly relied on the cooperation of their Ghanaian collaborators.
In recent times, however, the number of Nigerians pitching camp in Ghana–as students, business people, sex workers and as jobbers of no description–has increased, rather frighteningly. Some communities have suddenly yielded to a subculture which is neither completely Nigerian nor distinctly Ghanaian, creating an intriguing admixture of suspicion and insecurity.
Suddenly it has become a fad for Nigerians to attend university in Ghana when UNILAG, University of Nigeria (UNN), University of Ibadan, and Obafemi Awolowo University, remain competitive institutions of higher learning?
These were once citadels of scholarship in a country that has produced Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Chimanada Adichie.
Paradox of plenty
Ghanaians also question the strange sense of commerce of Nigerian businessmen and entrepreneurs who do not find it profitable to sell to their 250 million population (22 million in Lagos alone), but see Ghana’s 35 million market as viable for business.
Nigerian music and film industries enjoy huge patronage.
A keke rider in Lagos (Mahama Camboo) has a market 30 times bigger than the Ghana rider.
Why do Nigerians find Ghana attractive? Are they not proud of their country?
As fraternal twins, Ghanaians need to ask themselves the same questions.
We are only 35 million; why can’t we keep ourselves within our borders?
The logic (logos) is that if we grow any bigger, we would also suffer the paradox of plenty.
After the horrors of Ghana Must Go, there are still many Ghanaians playing good in nearly every sector of the Nigerian economy.
In South Africa, they tell us to go fix our country.
In Libya, they treat us like apologies who have bargained poorly for a little slice of human dignity.
In Spain, we are on the fringes.
In Italy, we are on the margins. Maybe the next time we task our big brothers in Nigeria to do better, we should not be speaking tongue-in-cheek; we should simply whisper it in our closets.
By KWESI TAWIAH-BENJAMIN
Tissues Of The Issues
bigfrontiers@gmail.com
Ottawa, Canada
