LUNCH
WITH DR EKWOW SPIO-GARBRAH, RECENT TELKOM SA DIRECTOR
r. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah is a Ghanaian national who is currently the Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth Technology Organisation (CTO) in London. He is also the former ambassador of Ghana to the United States of America and served as a government minister during the regime of Jerry John Rawlings. I had lunch with the man who until recently was a director of Telkom South Africa and who some believe will one day be the President of Ghana. In the brief encounter at a Johannesburg hotel, I only got to ask four questions to which I received loaded answers.
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EXPATRIATE
What is your opinion of what is going on in Africa at the moment with the rebellions in the North and coalitions in the Sub Saharan region? Africa is going through another phase of its political evolution. There was the independence era when we got rid of colonial masters. Then the military rulers took over. They did not have adequate knowledge of public administration and economics and so this was soon replaced by western style democracy with civilian rulers. The leadership in North Africa is largely made up of 30 year old family regimes which have over the years
proved not to be as uncorrupted as people presumed. High food costs have also caused people to take to the streets. In Sub Saharan Africa, democracy is also not working particularly well as evidenced by the situation in Cote D’Ivoire, Zimbabwe and Kenya. The problem is the winner-takes-all structure where those belonging to the ethnic group of the ‘defeated’ candidate feel like they will be in the cold for five years and therefore refuse to accept defeat. The challenge therefore is to figure out how to let others feel like winners even when they lose elections. We need to structure it in such a way that we are able to share benefits of