Read these two reports to get the context of this essay.
1. “The industrial group Thyssenkrupp is facing a drastic restructuring. The Executive Board around CEO Miguel Lopez (60) wants to convert the company into a holding company and thus create the basis to sell more parts, as BILD has learned from company circles. The headquarters is to be reduced from the current 500 to 100 employees, and further cuts are planned in the administration with around 1000 employees. “All that remains is an umbrella company without content,” says a person familiar with the processes. With this, Lopez heralds the end for a company that is linked to German history like no other. In the blast furnaces of Krupp (founded in 1811) and Thyssen (1891), the iron was melted that made the country’s rise to industrial status in the 19th century possible. But they also forged the weapons for the First World War and later for the Nazis.” – https://www.bild.de/geld/wirtschaft/thyssenkrupp-vor-zerschlagung-lopez-plant-drastischen-umbau-682c2e76308d433b5abe37c8
2. Germany — The Land of Bankruptcy
By 2025, Germany is expected to record more than 24,000 corporate bankruptcies, with more than 25,000 expected for 2026. More than 210,000 jobs are at risk. The sectors most affected include textiles, automotive, and healthcare.
In the first quarter of 2025 alone, 16 large companies with annual revenues of more than €50 million went bankrupt — twice as much as the same period last year.
According to data from Allianz Trade and the BDI Industrial Association, the situation is “worse than during the 2008 crisis”. Factors that have contributed to this include rising costs, Trump’s tariff policies and weak government support.” – https://nevillegafa.com/2025/06/08/germany-the-land-of-bankruptcy/
Welcome back.
So, Ghana—the land of Kwame Nkrumah, the land of the Black Star, and the country once poised to lead Africa into glorious postcolonial industrialization – has signed a glorious new deal with Germany. But, sadly, it is not a manufacturing pact, an agreement for technology transfer, or a bold plan for industrial cooperation or continental economic revival.
No, in 2025, Ghana chose to export its best and brightest skilled workforce to Germany.
We kid you not.
This is neither a satire nor some dark parody of a dystopian future. This is our present-day African leadership at work: hawking human capital like roasted groundnuts on the Accra-Tema motorway. And we’re supposed to clap for this?
Oh, Ghana! O, Africa!
Let us repeat the plain question we have asked ad nauseam: What is wrong with the current Black leadership elite? What sort of mental sickness afflicts those who misgovern us? How is it that, six decades after flag independence, the thinking of our so-called presidents still resembles that of colonial plantation managers?
The Ghanaian FM, who signed the inglorious pact, grinned like a village idiot as he exchanged documents with his German counterpart. He feels fulfilled; job well done. The professional politician who has never had a job outside politics feels satisfied with a well-done job. Per diem and estacode are assured.
Poor Africa. We are led by men who, at their core, believe that Africa’s only role in the world and the global economy remains as a hewer of wood – to export raw materials, human bodies, and cultural souls. And when they’re not shipping out cocoa, bauxite, or gold at giveaway prices, they’re shipping out people. Just like in slavery times, our local comprador class is hawking our fittest and brightest. You can bet that Germany will not settle for anything less than the most qualified.
For fulfilling the role of modern slave-catchers, our plantation supervisors feel giddy with fulfilment, get amply rewarded with fat salaries, per diem, and hefty appurtenances of offices.
This agreement with Germany is not some visionary Marshall Plan for African development. It is a high-tech rehash of the old slave trade: shiny visas replacing rusty shackles, labor contracts replacing whips. Instead of schooners on the Atlantic, we now have Ghanaian embassies facilitating the exodus of trained nurses, artisans, and engineers. The colonial script remains the same—the only thing that changes is the packaging.
It is not yet Uhuru for Africa!
Why would any serious country with ambition to develop train its citizens with scarce public resources only to export them for the benefit of a foreign power? Is Ghana an HR agency for the European Union?
What happened to building a nation? How would Mr Mahama, who told us about his dream of a 24-hour economy, realise this when the brightest in Ghana have been signed off to Germany?
For a man who claimed Nkrumah as an idol, we can only hope that Mahama 2.0 will not be as disappointing as Mahama 1.0.
A government that claims to be serious about development doesn’t spend billions building schools, technical institutes, and polytechnics – only to send the products of that investment overseas, while back home, hospitals rot, industries collapse, and local enterprises starve for skilled labor.
It is madness. It is betrayal. It is the treason of the economic kind.
Compare this betrayal to the vision of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s founding father. Say what you like about the man—his faults, one-party leanings, and Marxist rhetoric—one thing is clear: he had a plan. It’s a real plan, not this humiliating rent-a-worker gimmick being implemented by one who claimed to be his disciple.
Recognizing that no nation with no industrial or manufacturing capacity would ever be considered serious, Nkrumah, within just a few short years, established over 60 state-owned enterprises under the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), including:
The Bonsa Tyre Factory The GIHOC Distilleries The Aboso Glass Factory The Nsawam Cannery The Juapong Textiles The Komenda Sugar Factory The VALCO aluminum smelter (in partnership with Kaiser Aluminum) The Black Star Line shipping company The Tema Oil Refinery The Ghana Atomic Energy Commission The Akosombo Dam
These were not vanity projects. They were meant to serve as the backbone of a future industrial Ghana. Nkrumah understood something today’s misrulers don’t: that you can’t develop a country by sending your citizens away—you grow it by building inside, building the factories to turn your raw materials into finished goods, thus creating value at home, earning serious foreign exchange, and stopping depending on IMF prescriptions.
Yet what happened?
Successive governments, either too lazy or too compromised, allowed these enterprises to collapse – some through mismanagement, others through deliberate sabotage under the laughable guise of “liberalization” and “privatization.” IMF puppeteering, World Bank scripting. Today, many of these once-proud institutions lie in ruins, weeds sprouting from their bones like tombstones marking Ghana’s aborted industrial dream.
Instead of reviving these projects or building new ones, our leaders are signing agreements to send electricians and welders to Germany.
This policy is the zenith of economic idiocy. It is like selling your brain to buy bread.
A skilled worker trained in Ghana at public expense is a national asset. That person should be working in Ghana, building Ghana. That person should be part of the machinery that turns Ghanaian cocoa into chocolate bars, Ghanaian shea into cosmetics, and Ghanaian cotton into garments.
Instead, the Ghanaian state takes this national asset and gifts it to Germany, a country already benefiting disproportionately from centuries of African exploitation. Ghana gets a few euros in remittances and some hollow praise about “bilateral cooperation.” Germany gets low-cost, high-skill labor to shore up its aging workforce and collapsing industries.
Our plantation managers, who masquerade as presidents, expect us to celebrate this as visionary leadership.
We should ask the obvious question: why not reverse the flow?
Instead of sending Africans to Germany or France or wherever, why can’t our leaders ask China—yes, China—to relocate some of its older manufacturing plants to Africa under Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) models? China has thousands of aging production lines that it no longer needs domestically. Relocate them to Ghana. Train local workers. Use African raw materials. Produce finished goods in Africa for African and global markets. Create jobs. Build skills. Boost GDP.
Why is this too complicated for our Harvard- and Oxford-educated rulers to grasp?
What kind of economic model is this, where the only thing African countries seem capable of exporting is their raw materials and people?
It’s the same twisted logic that underpins our raw material exports. For centuries, Africa has been bleeding resources: gold, diamonds, rubber, copper, cobalt, and oil. All are dug out and shipped away, only to be re-imported as jewelry, phones, and luxury cars we can’t afford.
What is wrong with us?
Now, the same logic is being applied to people. Who said that slavery is over?
What is the point of sending Ghanaian nurses to Germany when hospitals are understaffed, under-equipped, and overwhelmed? What is the benefit of sending engineers to European factories that process African minerals instead of building those factories here?
It’s bad enough to be robbed. But to celebrate your robbery? That’s the height of colonial mental conditioning.
One has to wonder if Ghanaian officials are even paying attention to Germany’s economic reality.
Germany is not the industrial titan it used to be. The two examples above show that Germany is undergoing a shocking pace of severe deindustrialization. Energy costs have skyrocketed since the revanchist Nazis in power in Germany broke ties with Moscow. The automotive, chemical, and manufacturing sectors are struggling or relocating abroad. Even the German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle has raised the question: Is Germany’s economic model doomed?
Watch their report here: “Is Germany’s economic model doomed?” – DW Business Beyond
Here are some of the major German firms that have either collapsed or moved operations in recent years:
BASF, the chemical giant, is downsizing in Germany due to high energy costs. Volkswagen is investing more outside of Europe. Siemens Energy has posted staggering losses and is undergoing restructuring. Thyssenkrupp is laying off workers and shedding assets. Continental AG has closed German factories and shifted jobs to cheaper countries.
This is the country our leaders are betting Ghana’s future on.
Why would the plantation supervisors who parade as African presidents not get some education? We do not write anything that is not in the public domain. Why are the people who lead us in Africa so mentally and intellectually lazy? Why would they not broaden their minds by reading widely?
No, I don’t mean the paper kind. Not the PhDs and MBAs in colonial economics. I mean real education – intellectual independence. Strategic thinking. A commitment to the people you claim to serve. The courage to break out of mental enslavement.
This is what the Chinese and the Iranians did.
These shameless misrulers should stop embarrassing themselves, stop humiliating their citizens, and stop copying the failed models of their former masters.
Africa does not need to send its children abroad to develop. It must invest in Africa and Africa, create industries, build supply chains, add value, and retain talent. That is how China, South Korea, and even Germany, in their prime, did it.
Why can’t Ghana? Why can’t Nigeria? Kenya? Senegal? Ivory Coast?
Why is sending a trained nurse to Hamburg easier than building a modern clinic in Tamale? Why is it easier to send a mechanical engineer to Stuttgart than to reopen the Aboso Glass Factory or the Bonsa Tyre Plant?
Why?
Until these questions are answered, until our leaders abandon their plantation-manager mentality, Africa will remain the eternal exporter of human capital and natural resources and importer of poverty.
And we will continue to be led – not by presidents, not by patriots – but by glorified shipping agents for the modern slave trade.
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Polemicist, Satirist, and Social Commentator.)
My Mission: Stultitia Delenda Est – Stupidity Must be Destroyed!
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