For almost one hour, Dr. Michael Abu-Sakara Foster, Country Director of Sasakawa Africa Association-World Bank Liaison, with offices in Adabraka, Ghana and Kampala, Uganda, cornered me at the car park of his house at Adabraka.

A northern Ghanaian, Dr. Foster's views reflects the on-going talks in Ghana that Ghanaian elites do not understand Ghana but see the country from totally different development values. The policies supposed to drive Ghana's development process, at least at the national level, are not informed by Ghanaian values. For almost 50 years, foreign development values have dominated the development process in Ghana/Africa, creating distortion and confusion. No doubt, civil society organizations within the Commonwealth of Nations, members of former British colonies, have called on African Finance Ministers to support home-grown development strategies informed by African values and experiences reached through broad discussions with Africans.

Dr. Foster was at pains to describe how Accra makes policies without any input from the very people the policies affect. Being the poorest area in Ghana, policies that address the northern part of Ghana are developed in Accra without any input from the values of the north, consequently being irrelevant to the north. This makes Ghanaian policy-makers "mediocre," as Prof. Ali Mazrui, the Kenyan thinker, would say.  

Informed Ghanaians/Africans, and some international development experts such as Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, of America's Columbia University-based Earth Institute, are increasingly coming to terms with the fact that a nation cannot progress without letting its cultural values drive its progress. From the Europeans to the newly emerging economic giants China and India, their progress is driven by key cultural values and experiences. In Ottawa, Dr. Daniel Tetteh Osabu-Kle, the Ghanaian-Canadian political scientist at Carleton University, says that the trick is to empower Ghanaian/African values, which have been suppressed for long in national policy development. The issue of the worsening sanitation situation in Ghanaian cities for instance, could be solved by empowering traditional rulers to tackle this problem with minimal cost. 

“If Ghanaian elites, as key directors of progress, do not think within their values first, and any other second, can we say they are not intelligent?” asks Dr. Foster rhetorically, looking intensely at my face under the hot Ghanaian sun, "Are we (Ghanaians/Africans) intelligent?"

The answer is both yes and no. Yes, we are intelligent. Ghanaian rich values and experiences which have sustained them since time immemorial informally direct Ghanaian affairs. On the other hand, No, we are not intelligent, because Ghanaian experiences and values, at the national level, do not dictate the Ghanaian development process but rather, Western values and experiences. No society develops by heavily letting foreign values drive its progress, as is the case with Ghana/Africa now. Societies develop by letting their home-grown values drive their progress, and borrowing, now and then, as the Europeans, the Japanese, and the Chinese have done, from other foreign values and experiences to enrich their progress.

In Ottawa, Andy Kusi Appiah, the Ghanaian-Canadian senior policy advisor with the City of Ottawa, thinks that the trouble with Ghana/African development is not with Western values, due to colonialism, but the Ghanaian/African elites, who unarguably cannot think well in terms of their development process, have misunderstood the Western values in relation to their indigenous values and experiences and messed up the two values, creating awful confusion. 

After talking to Andy, I switched on the TV and selected the Cable Public Affairs Channel (CPAC) where a conference entitled "Progressive Politics, Practical Solutions: Policy Choices for the 21st Century" was taking place at Mont Tremblant, Quebec. I watched Dr. Jeffrey Sachs and prominent African development voices like Dan Gardner, a senior journalist with the Ottawa Citizen, analyzing Africa's development problems and appealing to Ottawa and the Canadian International Development Agency to re-think African development factoring in broad African values and experiences when developing their foreign aid policies for Africa. 

Like the Mont Tremblant policy conference, across the Atlantic Ocean to Ghana, and by extension the rest of Africa, that's what Dr. Michael Abu-Sakara Foster and the increasing development-minded Ghanaians/Africans are saying - let Ghanaian/African experiences and values inform the development process and its policy making.