Assay,
Another season of predictable floods has caught us very unprepared.
Like Chicken Licken, we scream that the sky is falling down – also a predictable response, till the rains go away in July.
The procrastinating vulture, not the eagle, may represent our national character better. But new seasons have a way of resurrecting new dreams, some vain.
This new city matter in Ghana must be properly tabled for a transparent conversation. It cannot be handled as just another casual and cavalier political announcement.
Development is not best pursued as an act of blind faith. It requires systematic and strategic (read holistic) long-term planning.
The built-environment professionals, sociologists, and political-economy people should be all over it. Otherwise, we will walk straight into a familiar trap. History is replete with warnings.
Nigeria is a warning. Many Nigerians still insist Abuja bankrupted the country – financially and morally. The way government buildings in Lagos were simply emptied and then left to rot tells its own story.
Significant capital development needed to upgrade many parts of the entire country, to improve well-being for the many, went into the creation of a city-pad for the few. The few were, of course, mighty, politically powerful and influential. Nigerian elites built modern pyramids and cathedrals to their gods of graft and vanity.
Abuja created a new bubble, a procurement elite, and a class of people who became phenomenally rich from gigs that had nothing to do with genuine and sustainable national development.
A shining capital city was built; much of the country was not. The latter remained decrepit, shabby and poor.
So when Ghana starts floating its own “new city” idea, the question is not whether it looks modern. The question is whether the model is coherent and transparent.
Perhaps it is right, but can it be openly and professionally debated? Can it be properly modelled? I stress “properly”.
Or, at a time of flooded distress – pun intended – are we about to precipitately repeat Abuja with Ghanaian characteristics?
Andre Gunder Frank’s work on the modernisation of poverty is relevant here. Samir Amin extended it to African circumstances, because Frank’s base material was Latin America. The mechanism is straightforward: dispossession → rural stagnation → urban migration → slum formation.
Poverty is not accidental. It is produced by dysfunctional land relations and incoherent political choices.
City decongestion is not always achieved by building new cities. Sometimes, the real lever is fundamental land reform that makes rural life productive. We are very far from that.
When peasants are pushed off land – by chiefs, family heads, speculators, or the state – they troop to cities with nothing to do. Slums are created this way. Latin America’s Latifundia demonstrated this with brutal clarity. Illegal mining is producing our own non-agricultural Latifundia in Ghana.
So when JM says people should “go and buy land,” the question is simple: buy land from whom? From the same chiefs and family heads whose duplicity has filled our courts with endless litigation?
From a land-tenure system that is opaque, fragmented, and often feudal in practice? Ghana’s land market is not really a market. It is a three-cornered arrangement of traditional authority, family interests, and state bureaucracy. Without confronting that triangle, no new city will solve anything. The status quo today is chaotic.
China and Singapore, just to use those two examples, avoided this trap. In the main, Latin America, much of the West, India and Africa, did not.
Everywhere in these places, the slum problem “hides” what DuBois may have called “the throbbing mass.” Or Ralph Ellison more ominously, “the invisible men.”
Ghettoes, informal settlements, inner cities, favelas, townships, hoods – call them what you want – then become socially combustible sites of human contradictions and development failures. They float on social, infrastructural and institutional decay.
China’s Xi Jinping speaks of “no long queues to the city.” It has not been without challenges in execution. Yet, the visionary (and successful) idea is to modernise rural life so thoroughly – infrastructure, productivity, services – that people want to stay there.
Rural modernisation was not charity. It was strategy. It required discipline, land consolidation, and a state that could actually execute.
In summary, it needed focused and courageous leadership. Not shooting from the hip. None of this is easy, but those looking for an easy ride should not be in political leadership. They are better-off selling popcorn.
If Ghana’s new city is not embedded in a broader rural-modernisation agenda – one that tackles land tenure, rural productivity, and institutional discipline – then we are simply building another monument to elite ambition.
A skyline will rise. A new class will emerge. The structural problems will remain untouched. Development will elude us still.
And when that happens, the pattern is predictable: ten billionaires, 30 million beggars. Another cycle of woe begins, until the morning after…
We can avoid this by making the conversation and strategic planning inclusive, transparent and evidence-based.
Time will tell. But time has already told others. We just refuse to listen.
