Page 115 - Afrika Must Unite

100 AFRICA MUST UNITE
and encouraging farmers to join the United Ghana Farmers’
Council, the farmers’ representative council in Ghana, which
assists the sale of their produce and makes monetary advances
to them at the beginning of the crop seasons.
Thrift has not been a characteristic of our people, largely
because they have not enjoyed enough income to make the
question anything but academic. How to instil a need to spend
and save wisely among them has become a major preoccupation
now that they are beginning to enjoy higher incomes and the
taste for amenities. O ur family system actually discourages
family heads from saving, for the system, in effect, penalizes the
m an with initiative in favour of the lazy and the weak. The
indigent members of the family live upon the more fortunate
ones. A praiseworthy and useful practice in our past, more or less
stagnant society based on subsistence farming, it acts today as a
break upon ambition and drive. At the present time, the m an
who makes a reasonable living finds his money eaten up by his
relatives (and this includes the most extended members reaching
to the nth degree of relationship), so that he simply cannot meet
his personal obligations, let alone save anything.
But save we must, if we are to build up the hard reserves of
capital necessary for our development. Side by side with the
family hindrance to saving, there has been a real and developing
increase in expenditure upon a vast miscellany of imported
goods. The danger inherent in trying to ‘keep up with the
Joneses’ which results in the rising cost in personal expenditure
is something upon which we are trying to put a brake, not merely
because this kind of spending encourages inflation, but because it
produces false standards and illusory ideas of wealth in an
economy which has not yet got off to a real start on the road of
reconstruction and development. It is for these several reasons
that we have introduced compulsory savings and curtailed the
importation of what we regard as inessential goods. We have also
established a national lottery, extended post office savings facil­
ities, and set up a savings branch in our national bank. We
are looking into the means of encouraging investment in new
businesses and industrial undertakings, which will encourage
enterprise and initiative and help in building up managerial
skill.