I fell in love with Nii Moi Thompson!
In 2008 when circumstances beyond the control of Dr Nii Moi Thompson conspired to keep him away from Ghana and, by extension, out of the National Commission on Culture to whose membership he had been appointed by President John Agyekum Kufuor, I wrote in the Ghanaian Times to regret that we lost such a brain.
Advertisement
Eight years ago when I took that position, I had not even had the benefit of the man’s thoughts on culture. Those were the days of my relentless advocacy to move the definition of culture away from the overemphasis on “drumming and dancing”. I thought the country needed economists, medical doctors and engineers in the formulation of cultural policies. Though I did not know the gentleman from Adam, I had fallen hopelessly in love with his practical economic theories on radio and television.
Eight years later, guess who Prof Esi Sutherland Addy and Akunu Dake invited to speak to members of the Ghana Culture Forum on the occasion of Ghana Culture Day? The selfsame Nii Moi.
My first instinct: What a godsend opportunity for forum members to teach him a thing or two about culture now that he had been made CEO of the National Development Planning Commission.
“Teach?” That is where I made a mistake – the same mistake I made when, in the mid-1980s I attended a cultural policy forum at GIMPA. I went there determined to use ‘Question Time’ to “lecture” P.V. Obeng, the de facto Prime Minister of Ghana who had been advertised as the Guest Speaker. I came away humbled but happy. When P.V. spoke, I thought he should have been the Minister of Culture. (RIP)
Last March 14, I listened to Nii Moi Thompson and immediately suspected that he had read a compilation of all the articles I had written on the subject since the late 1980s when I started getting irritated by what seemed to be the “official definition” of culture. You may not believe it, but once upon a time in Ghana, a whole Chairman (Minister) of the Commission on Culture described culture as “something we do for leisure”! He spoke on a live TV programme on which I was a panellist. Unable to control myself, I “misbehaved” on the set: I went livid.
So come 2016 Culture Day and there stood Nii Moi. My God, the CEO of Ghana’s Planning Commission was singing songs from his infancy! I think he even went poetic. First shock. Then he spoke. No, he did not redefine culture: he was pointing out what this nation had missed from the real definition for so long.
He was challenging us to ask one question: who is a Ghanaian? In other words, who are the people called Ghanaians? That question was so crucial because a faithful and true answer to it constituted the definition of Ghanaian culture.
Other Trending Stories
I didn’t like his answer to the question of Ghanaian ladies in Brazilian and Peruvian hair. It was too dismissive of the real meat of the issue. But even there, I understood him later as drawing attention to an overemphasis on externalities. He was saying that going about in Brazilian hair and imported nail extensions might not define us, but that pales into insignificance compared with what is on the inside of us.
For him “Ghanaian culture” is when the sight of a man in suit getting out of his BMW or Mercedes Benz to piss into an open gutter or anywhere in public would be repugnant to us.
For him, “Ghanaian culture” would have been properly defined when as a people, our conscience would feel insulted that Ghanaian films major too much in wife beating; when we report late for every function and think it is ‘African Time’.
My mind was racing. Why has corruption taken such deep roots in Ghana? It is because we have abandoned the “real culture” of public shame and social conscience. This is a country that has lost all its values. Not a single one left. Pardon the hyperbole but let’s ask ourselves: who teaches them? Who gets punished for the aberrations?
The forum with the NDPC CEO was so important because here was its chairman drawing attention of the nation to the economic significance of America’s cultural exports such as “hamburger” and tomato ketchup. While the former is a deliberate policy to promote American wheat, the latter puts money in the pockets of tomato farmers. What is “baked beans” but value addition by creative industrialists? The answer, he suggested, is a National Nutrition Policy.
Talk of Creative Arts. The contention has been that the Creative Industries’ plan in the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy of 2005 and the Creative Industries Sector Medium-Term Development Plan under the Ghana Shared Growth and Development Agenda (2010-2013) were not implemented.
I still think that the realignment of the three sub-sectors into one Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts has not been a bad policy decision after all. Culture has, since the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah, not been able (or allowed) to walk alone. Culture’s expressive manifestation, the Creative Arts, is the main food on which tourism feeds. I believe that the real effect of this re-alignment will be seen five years down the line.
The forte of the current Minister of the sector, Mrs Elizabeth Ofosu-Agyare’s is that she knows she is not a cultural practitioner by training or vocation. To compensate for this, she listens. She may not have got it right 100 per cent of the time, but she has steered the path of pragmatic development as she battles funds availability.
I think that time has come for artists to engage more with the ministry. For example, more pressure would have to be mounted to get the new Creative Arts Bill passed so we could have our council as the implementing agency for Creative Arts wing of the ministry.