Ghana’s Chieftaincy and Culture Minister, Sampson Kwaku Boafo, in his quest to address the negative practices within the Ghanaian culture, does not know that due to globalization, Ghanaians are now seeing how a people freed from burdensome cultural practices live. While attempting to refine the negative practices, some of the good parts are under-siege.

Mr. Boafo observes that “practices such as puberty, widowhood rites and funeral celebrations should be reformed to conform to modernization. But the situation is more complicated than Mr. Boafo and his bureaucrats envisage, and will demand deeper thinking, holistic research, global reach and sustained media campaigns, especially in indigenous Ghanaian languages.

Francis Amponsah, a jobless 26-year-old resident in the rural setting of Nkawie in the Ashanti Region, told a local circuit court that evil spirits disturbing him compelled him to commit crime. Amposah, like many average Ghanaians, is convinced that evil spirits or demons influence people to commit crime. Elsewhere in Tongo, in the Ghana’s Upper East Region, Bugre Gban, a 28-year-old butcher, tried to test his juju by shooting himself. Gban killed himself instead. These are inhibiting cultural values at work.

Amponsah and Gban patterns persist in Ghana. While the scientific side of their mind demands objective evidence as to why evil spirits and juju should let them commit crime, their brains’ mythopoeic side entices them to irrational marvels. Can these matters be addressed with a whole mind? Can the two instincts of the Ghanaian brain, the rational and the irrational be made to reconcile?

The economist Nii Moi Thompson says, part of the new generation of Ghanaian thinkers challenging erroneous values in Ghana’s progress, will discard the possibility. “Prove them,” he would demand. Such thinking would have solved Ghana’s developmental problems by now.

The Ghanaian development process, driven by increased democratization, is offering broad answers to cultural inhibitions. In both Amponsah and Gban, the Ghana Police Service, part of the country’s objective society, told law courts that they were led into crime – stealing and self-murder – by their human agency, the will to commit crime, and not any demons, evil spirits or juju.

Why is the average Ghanaian fascinated by irrational forces in their daily struggles? The reasoning goes beyond poverty. The major answer – certain erroneous ancient cultural values. According to Nii Moi Thompson, there is a “limit to the supernatural…To the cultural inhibitions…We have to start reasoning about our progress.”

While certain mysteries and beliefs titillate the Ghanaian mind (witches wining and dining on human meat on top of a tall tree over-night, for instance), it usually demeans the human place in the Ghanaian cosmological and developmental scheme. The Ghana that her Founding Fathers created, out of African civilization, as the late Dr. J.B. Danquah will tell you, becomes ever more marginal, a receding dot. Nii Moi Evil spirits and jujus need not be superior to Ghanaians’ will to develop.

Ghanaians fascination with the irrational aspects of their culture – the disturbing spectre of ritual killing of children for traditional sacrifice, reflects their inability to think beyond erroneous beliefs.

Until Ghanaians, especially her lazy elites, rationalize their cultural values and move away from the cultural inhibitions dictating events, juju and evil spirits will continue reigning upon  Ghana’s larger development and thinking  arenas.