Courage Quashigah is increasingly emerging as one of the people thinking through Ghana’s culture in terms of its prosperity. The Health Minister has an unassailable grasp of Ghana. For a while, Quashigah has not only been provoking Ghanaians to discuss certain aspects of their culture that hinders prosperity but also spoken about the need to raise the good parts for policy-making; integrate traditional medicine into the healthcare; and eat healthy traditional foods.

Quashigah’s latest observation that there is a “national craze for burial and funeral festivities” that have steadily emerged as the "most productive industry" in Ghana to the detriment of the country's progress  once again confirms his position as one of the emerging thinkers ready to confront the feared and dreadful ancient cultural practices that have been stifling Ghana’s progress. While other Ghanaians have been talking about the funeral in relation to its high cost, Quashigah’s ability to tie it to global human progress, makes the case to refine the high cost of funeral ceremonies, especially how it is associated with increasing death rate and decreasing life expectancy.

While other countries are working hard to decrease death, Quashigah observes that in Ghana, there is rather a “national thirst for funerals, thus boosting the price of coffins and funeral fabrics.” This is in the face of the average Ghanaian living just up to 57 years and infant mortality rising to 68 per 1,000 births. Quashigah’s reasoning that while increasing poverty should have helped to halt excessive funeral practices; clutches of the strong culture have prevented this, making Ghanaians possessed with “death and the quest to be the best coffin makers in the world.”

While Quashigah’s observations are of concern to right thinking Ghanaians, there is increasing global concern about the impact of certain cultural practices on progress. The issue is not that some cultures are better than others at creating freedom, prosperity, and justice. The issue, as Quashigah’s observation indicates, is cross cultural. In Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington,  the difficult question of addressing culture and prosperity is skillfully taken on by all the contributors, making the case that culture matters in creating prosperity. How your culture creates advancement is the ability to use the good parts and at the same time refine the inhibiting parts. Quashigah answers this question in the Ghanaian funeral context by arguing that “while the organization of costly funerals benefits a few service providers, it nonetheless saps the nation of huge sums of money.”

Lawrence Harrison, also part of the global culture-prosperity lights, deduces that what made the United States’ political system function was a culture affable to democracy. The first rate German sociologist, Max Weber, reveals that the rise of Western capitalist development is fundamentally a cultural fact entrenched in religion. Quashigah’s recognition of “ignorance as being at the heart of the new craze” and urging “Ghanaians to collectively help to stem it,” debunks any claim of value judgment about working to brighten some aspects of the Ghanaian culture for progress. Quashigah may answer the Cameroonian Daniel Etounga-Manguelle’s question of the African culture in relation to the continent’s continuing development troubles as to what cultural re-orientation is necessary for Africa to prosper.

It appears that Ghanaians trust the dead more than the living. Quashigah’s thinking, in terms of trust, culture and prosperity, is seen in the prominent American international development guru Francis Fukuyama's Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity. Fukuyama makes that case that culture impacts economic prosperity and that the most “pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation's prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust.” Add the syndrome of Pull Him Down (PHD), a cultural practice where Ghanaians destroy each other as they try to progress, to the craze to spend massively on the dead than the living, and you get the Fukuyama case in Ghana. As Quashigah and others are doing, more Ghanaians in position of trust have to join the campaign to refine the inhibitions within their culture for prosperity.