Ghanaians Live just in the Present Moment
How Ghana's inability to learn from the past and lack of vision for the future is creating a future of hopelessness for generation to come.
A recent viral video featured an American woman being interviewed by a Ghanaian in the United States. The woman, who lives in Miami, explained that she had previously lived in Ghana for academic research conducted on behalf of her university. When asked about the purpose of her research, she said it was to understand why Ghana is “neurologically sound”—a country with no civil wars and relatively sustained peace.
When she was asked about the outcome of the research, she explained:
“After five years of research—traveling from the bottom of Ghana to the top and asking the same question—we found that Ghanaians simply live in the present moment.”
Many people who watched the video focused on praising Ghana for being peaceful, and rightly so. If there is any continent deeply divided against itself, it is Africa. Africans were deliberately divided geographically during the Berlin Conference, tribally through the creation of artificial boundaries, religiously through the introduction of competing belief systems, and politically through imposed governance structures. Within Ghana alone, we see tribal divisions, religious fragmentation, political party rivalries, and internal factions—all of them legacies of colonial interference.
In spite of these deep and intentional divisions by colonialists, Ghana has remained relatively peaceful. That is no small achievement and deserves acknowledgment.
However, what struck me most was not the praise for Ghana’s peace, but the explanation given for it—that Ghanaians “live in the present moment”. If you noticed closely, there was a subtle shift in her facial expression and tone when she made that statement. In my personal assessment, that remark was not a compliment.
I must clarify that this is my own interpretation and not a verified conclusion of her study. However, it raises an important issue worth examining.
What does it mean to live in the “present moment”
Living in the present is often described as mindfulness—the practice of focusing one’s attention on the “here and now,” without anxiety about the future or regret about the past. It involves awareness of one’s immediate experience, reducing stress, and engaging fully with the moment.
While mindfulness has psychological benefits, there is another side to living perpetually in the present—especially at the level of a society or nation.
Her comments immediately reminded me of the famous Marshmallow Study conducted in the late 1960s on delayed gratification. In that experiment, children were offered a choice: one marshmallow immediately, or two marshmallows if they could wait. Researchers later found that children who were able to delay gratification tended to have better long-term outcomes, including higher academic achievement, stronger self-control, and improved life stability. The ability to delay gratification was more common among older children with higher maturity.
So what does this mean in a national context?
A society that lives only in the present prioritizes immediate comfort over long-term planning. Such a society focuses on “now” and “then,” without serious consideration for the future or even lessons from the past. In my view, this kind of mindset produces very little lasting achievement. And even when something is achieved, it is often individual and short-lived, offering no meaningful benefit to future generations.
This pattern is evident across many aspects of Ghana today.
Giving Away the Future for Quick Gratification
In the article titled Ghana’s Lithium Deal: Why Ghana Keeps Giving Away Its Future, I explained how short-term thinking and instant gratification among leaders are destroying Ghana’s long-term prospects. Because our leaders focus on the present moment, they are quick to sell Ghana’s natural resources cheaply in exchange for immediate cash.
This mindset is not limited to the lithium deal, where Ghana celebrates a mere 5–10% royalty. It extends to deals that have been made with Ghana’s gold, diamonds, bauxite, oil, and other strategic resources which benefits foreign nations. These decisions satisfy immediate desires while leaving the youth and future generations with nothing.
This way of thinking aligns perfectly with how colonial systems want formerly colonized people to behave—content with temporary comfort, peaceful compliance, and short-term rewards. Such “peace” is conditional and fragile. The moment you become aware and begin to resist exploitation, you realize that those who benefit from your silence were never your friends.
Conversely, consider the United States. It is known to have oil reserves capable of sustaining the country for over 200 years if drilling and imports were halted. Yet successive generations continue to plan aggressively for the future, accumulating more resources, expanding influence, and protecting long-term national interests—sometimes by force. This is a country that is living not just in the present moment, but in the future as well to create generational wealth and capacity.
Now ask yourself honestly: if Ghana were to experience a major shutdown today, could we sustain ourselves for even one or two years? The answer reveals the truth behind that researcher’s observation. Living only in the present is a sign of leadership without vision.
Is it not telling that Ghana does not even have a national 20-year development plan agreed upon across political parties? Instead, successive governments dismantle one another’s policies, propagate propaganda against even good ideas, and run the country in circles—year after year—with little progress. They do this so each political party can celebrate present wins at the expense of the future of the country.
Emergency Preparedness and National Failure
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed this weakness even more clearly. During global lockdowns, Ghana struggled to produce something as basic as face masks. We had no local capacity. Food insecurity became widespread, and videos surfaced of citizens scrambling for relief items distributed by NGOs.
Meanwhile, in developed countries like the United States, families received stimulus checks—financial support drawn from national reserves that sustained millions throughout the crisis. Those reserves existed because earlier generations planned for emergencies.
In Ghana, much of our national wealth has been mismanaged, stolen, or surrendered. The pandemic exposed the fact that, in time of emergency, Ghana cannot survive past probably a year because we always live in the present moment.
Political Decisions and Instant Gratification
This same mindset is evident during elections. Political parties distribute money, rice, cooking oil, machetes, and other items to voters in exchange for votes. Because many citizens are conditioned to prioritize immediate gain, they accept these gifts—forgetting past suffering under the same administrations and ignoring the future consequences.
People would rather enjoy the moment than endure temporary hardship for long-term benefit. This culture of instant gratification affects both leaders and the governed.
Let me borrow a Jewish proverb that says:
“A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.”
While developed nations are planning for generations they may never meet, many of our leaders continue to live only in the present. If we do not change this mindset—at both leadership and societal levels—peace alone will not save us.
Is it not long overdue that we learn from one of our own, Dr Kwame Nkrumah - the greatest African visionary that ever lived?
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah governed with generations in mind. He understood that political independence without economic and industrial power was meaningless. That is why he pursued rapid industrialization, establishing over fifty state-owned industries so that Ghana could produce what it consumed instead of exporting raw materials and importing finished goods at exploitative prices. Many of these industries continued to sustain Ghana long after he was overthrown—proof that his ideas were not reckless, but simply ahead of their time.
Nkrumah built the Akosombo Dam to power Ghana’s future. More than fifty years later, it still remains the major backbone of Ghana’s electricity supply. He insisted on state control over minerals, energy, and strategic industries because he understood that foreign ownership disguised as “investment” would eventually strip Ghana of sovereignty and reduce the state to a beggar in its own land. Today, as Ghana signs away lithium, gold, oil, and bauxite for quick money royalties, we are living inside the very warning he gave.
He also initiated Ghana’s nuclear energy program because he foresaw that true power in the modern world would be determined by advanced science, technology, and energy capacity. That program was abandoned after his removal. Decades later, we regret.
Perhaps most dangerously ignored was Nkrumah’s vision of African unity. He warned that without continental unity, African states would remain weak, divided, and permanently vulnerable to neocolonial control. Today, Africa remains fragmented, bargaining individually with global powers from positions of weakness—exactly the future he tried to prevent.
Books cannot contain the vision he had for a continent and country he loved. The tragedy is that he was right too early, and we lacked the patience, discipline, and foresight to follow him even till this day. The cost of betraying him and rejecting long-term vision in favor of immediate comfort is the crisis Ghana and Africa faces today and the mistake we keep making. Our leaders of today are busily fighting and opposing each other - in the name of practicing what they think is the best governance system their colonialists have given them. They seek their interest in the “now and then” and surprisingly they have rallied the whole nation through that path.
It is time we stop living only in the present moment as a country. Generations yet unborn will judge us—not by how peaceful we were, but by what we built, what we protected, and what we left behind. We must learn to do better, or be remembered no better.