Please Donate Infrastructur

 There were many things that surprised me when I started the new life in Ghana. Some were cultural differences and some were social differences. I love to see the former but the latter can make me sad from time to time. I always enjoy different smiles in different culture like Vietnam, Poland, Lithuania, but when I went to Ukraine, I encountered heritages of the Soviet Union, which made me quite sad. Buildings were pretty tired, roads were so rough, and seats in buses were torn up like rag and so on. People are innocent and live life in peace but they suffer from social system. Yet I was really touched by Ukraine people bravely living with beautiful smile in the heritage.

Please recall the relationship between software and hardware: if you don’t have hardware, you can’t use software and vice versa. It is applied for anything in human activities. Suppose that you study at university, without rooms, chairs, desks (hardware), you can’t study and without teachers, subjects, administration (software), you can’t learn, so you need both. I define hardware as anything you can touch and Software as a set of ideas. So what are Hardware and Software to develop country? The hardware is infrastructure and the software is people, more precisely spirits of people.

In my definition, Economy is: “Movement of things and people and money is lubricating oil to reduce friction of the movement.” Therefore infrastructure for movement is the priority to develop countries such as roads, railways, ports, water and electricity supply. When I took a bus from Accra to Kumasi (1^st and 2^nd biggest cities in Ghana), which is extremely important for the entire economy of Ghana, I was really shocked by the unbelievably miserable road. Although so many vehicles were going and coming on the road, it wasn’t paved for several kilometers long or more, so the bus was shaking, pitching, waving, and swaying on the bumpy road for hours. I wonder why it hasn’t been paved for such a long time by government or foreign aid. By comparison, there is a well -paved road from Tamale to Bolgatanga passing in front of my school and I heard that this road was built with the help of Japan, and Japan also organizes several projects for agriculture like rice farming.

It is said that the money “given” to Africa after the World War II is over $ 30,000 per head. There are many help from Western countries but they mainly give aids in the field of education and health, but not in agriculture and infrastructure. Why? It is highly related to structure of their economy. In Western countries, government subsidizes agriculture and they export agricultural products to developing countries. As infrastructure is a tool to make products, if they gave infrastructure and agricultural knowledge to developing countries, African countries would make products on their own, even export agricultural products in markets. If it happened, Western countries would lose the big market, “Africa”. That’s why Western people don’t invest on infrastructure and agriculture but bring completed products, because developing countries are big customers for them. They are willing to give political independence but not economical independence. Imperialism does die hard.

To tell the truth, to develop country is very easy, just donate infrastructure. And in fact this is what Japan had done in Korean peninsula and Taiwan. When Japan annexed them, the Japanese administration first of all invested on social infrastructure and brought up industries, as much as it did in the mainland, because they were part of Japan. Thanks to the infrastructure, Taiwan and Korea are successful in modernization of country. If you really want to help developing countries, you don’t need to donate hearing aids without sufficient training, but please donate infrastructure.