Ghana Life: A man and his taxi
This is a true story; only the names have been changed or omitted to avoid embarrassment. It is a story that illustrates the dire economic situation of the early 1980s brought about by the revolution that followed the second coming of Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings on December 31, 1981. It is not a story about extreme poverty, but about a member of a relatively well-to-do family. community: the faculty of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi. It is a story about what should be a happy event: the purchase of his first car by a young man, but in those dark days happy events were few and far between.
The fundamental economic problem in Ghana in the early 1980s was the same as it was during the Acheampong years of the previous decade. The monetary unit, the cedi, was set at 2.75 to the US dollar, but its purchasing power had fallen well below its face value at the official exchange rate. For those who could obtain an import license, importing a vehicle was considered relatively cheap in terms of cedi. However, import licenses were very difficult to obtain and imported goods were resold at black market prices that reflected the true purchasing power of the currency.
UST’s Technology Consulting Center (TCC) had adopted a policy of hiring college graduates for their year of National Service and keeping the best young men as research assistants. Over the years since its founding in 1972, TCC had built an effective team of these young professionals, but retaining them was becoming difficult as local salaries were rapidly losing value and opportunities were attracting from more advanced countries abroad. The administration was always looking for ways to reward merit within the limits imposed by university regulations and evident economic limitations.
Kwesi was a young man of exceptional talent and work performance, who served for several years with no hint of wanting to seek greener pastures, but had a keen interest in buying a car. He insisted that he could pay the cost if he could pay at the official exchange rate. The expatriate manager was then persuaded to purchase a car in the UK and resell it to Kwesi on specified terms. The cedis were repaid in periodic installments, and for a few weeks Kwesi basked in the envy of his classmates as he drove around campus in his shiny new Japanese sedan. Then, to the horror of TCC management, Kwesi pulled up to the office parking lot one morning with the wings of his car painted yellow.
Visitors to Ghana immediately see that half the cars on the roads have wings painted yellow, the official designation for a taxi. Kwesi told the director that he had discovered that he could not run his car on his college salary and needed to operate the vehicle as a taxi to meet regular payments. He said that he did not intend to become a taxi driver, but that he would hire a younger brother to work on the streets of Kumasi.
From that point on, Kwesi’s car was rarely seen on campus and it was about six months later that the principal saw it again parked in the office. The shiny new car had aged twenty years, and the once skinny younger brother now had a corpulent, mature stature. Kwesi was asked if he was satisfied with the earnings from his taxi business. He said the business was failing due to fuel shortages. The taxi spent most days waiting in a queue at the service station. Kwesi was then asked if he thought his brother was cheating on him. He expressed his surprise at being asked this question and said that he was sure that he could trust his brother. He wanted to know why the director had asked this question. The answer was another question: ‘Have you noticed how fat your brother has become?’ A shadow of doubt crossed the young man’s face. “I’ll look into it,” he said.
When he came to report later, Kwesi admitted that his brother had withheld much of the income he had earned from the taxi business. In many days, the brother had managed to get fuel and function normally, but he had informed Kwesi that he had been sitting idle all day in line at the gas station. Kwesi fired his brother, but was faced with an acute dilemma: if he couldn’t trust his brother, who could he trust to drive the taxi? If the taxi sat idle, he couldn’t afford to operate it as a private car, especially since its worn and battered condition required frequent repairs to keep it on the road. His only option was to sell the vehicle, and the amount he received barely covered the outstanding balance owed to the director.
Only the wealthy could afford a private car in Rawlings’s revolutionary Ghana. Aspiration was beyond the reach of young, salaried professionals, and on the college campus, even professors who didn’t have a thriving consulting practice found their trusty old clunkers had to be put away. The essential problem remained until April 1983, when the exchange rate of the cedi fell from 2.75 to 24.69 cedis per US dollar, with frequent further devaluations over the next three years. As for Kwesi, his personal problem was resolved a few years later when he was invited to study for his Ph.D. at an Ivy League university in the United States.