I haven’t yet reached the 100th page of Lee Kuan Yew’s 729-paged
memoir: From Third World To First,
but I’m already fascinated by how Singapore broke free from the shackles of
poverty and journeyed itself into greatness. With a team of enterprising men
and women led by the writer, the natural
resource-less country was transformed by the power of human capital and a sheer
passion for excellence, and catapulted from a third world country to a first.
My beloved Ghana is undoubtedly a land endowed with milk and honey, but
her citizenry is ludicrously fed with manna. We have been served this staple
since independence and thus have become accustomed with accepting and celebrating
anything that appears a little better than our ‘delicacy’.
For a twenty-something year old, I carry too much pain in my heart. Pains
I think are enough for the faint-hearted to just fall to the ground clutching
the left section of their chest and be called to eternal glory. I have
witnessed the ordinary being celebrated as achievements worthy of reward in
recent past, and I’ll endeavour to catalogue a few of them here [feel free to
add yours in the comment box below].
The humiliation from some foreign media calling Ghana a ‘circus’
following the incidents that led to our exit from the world cup still hurts, so
I will start my musings from there. Prior to the tournament, the GFA set a clear
target for our ‘super coach’ James Kwesi Appiah. His was a semi-final berth for
the Black Stars since anything short of that would draw criticism from the many
football aficionados in the country. Whether that ambition in itself was
realistic is another topic worth debating.
