Why I Stayed

Is Africa worth your life?

I was twenty-two when a man who had known me for five minutes asked me why I was still in Ghana. He meant it as a compliment. He had spent an afternoon listening to me talk about ideas and concluded, kindly, that I was wasted here. He probably forgot the conversation by morning. I did not. I went home and spent the next three years trying to actually answer the question, instead of just enjoying being flattered by it.

Where I'm from, that question already has a name. We call it jakpa. It means leaving properly, packing your life into a visa application with no real plan to come back. It is not an insult and it is not a compliment either. It is just the word for the thing almost everyone around me was either doing, planning, or quietly embarrassed not to have managed yet.

I have a mentee in high school who studies harder than anyone I know. Not for the exams here. For the SAT, for the scholarship essay, for the embassy interview three years from now. I asked her once what she wanted to study. She told me, then added, almost as an afterthought, that none of it would matter if she didn't jakpa first. She is sixteen. The exit was already the plan. The degree was just the vehicle.

My friends from university talk about Ghana the way you talk about something you have already decided to leave. Fondly, a little sadly, with no real intention of staying. Several of them describe, in real detail, exactly how they will help develop the country once they have left it. The help is always conditional on the leaving. I used to find that strange. I do not anymore. I understand the logic completely. I just did not end up making the same choice.

I want to be honest about why, because the honest version is less inspiring than the version people want to hear.

It is not that I think Ghana is an easier place to build a life than London or Toronto or Dubai. It is not. The numbers behind why people leave are not invented or exaggerated. By 2010, thirty eight percent of college educated Africans were living abroad.¹ Ghana had lost sixty percent of its locally trained doctors.² Those are not failures of will. Those are people responding rationally to where the opportunity, the safety, and the basic dignity of being paid on time were better. I do not think less of anyone who left. Some of the people I respect most are gone, and they are thriving, and I am happy for them without reservation.

What changed for me was not some discovery that Ghana is actually fine. It is not always fine. What changed was the question I was asking.

For a long time I was asking, is it good here. Some days the honest answer was no. The power cuts, the slow systems, the sense that talent gets recognised everywhere except at home. All of that is real and I am not going to smooth it over to make a tidier story.

Somewhere in those three years I started asking a different question instead. Not is it good here, but what can be done with what is actually here. That is a smaller question, and a far more useful one. It does not ask me to deny anything. It just asks me to look at the material in front of me instead of the comparison to somewhere else.

And the material was more than the brain drain numbers had prepared me for. Africa holds close to thirty percent of the world's mineral reserves and roughly sixty percent of the world's remaining uncultivated arable land.³ The continent's working age population is projected to reach about 1.2 billion by 2050, at the exact moment most of the rest of the world is ageing and shrinking.⁴ The African Continental Free Trade Area, if it works the way it is meant to, creates a single market of 1.3 billion people with a combined economy worth around 3.4 trillion dollars.⁵ None of that is destiny. It is raw material, sitting there, waiting for someone to organise it into something.

Patrick Awuah left a comfortable career at Microsoft to build a university in Ghana that did not exist yet. His reasoning was almost annoyingly simple: if he did not try, he would have failed anyway, so why not try. I think about that sentence more than almost anything else I have read. It does not promise success. It just removes the excuse for never attempting it.

That is closer to why I stayed than any patriotic feeling. I did not stay because I love Ghana more than the people who left love it. I stayed because I ran the arithmetic on trying here versus not trying, and the worst case looked survivable, and the best case looked like something worth more than comfort somewhere else.

I want to be careful here, because I know how this can sound from the outside, like I have it figured out and everyone who left simply did not think it through. That is not what I believe. Staying is not the brave choice and leaving is not the weak one. They are both just choices, made under real constraints, by people who get to decide what they owe themselves and what they owe the place that raised them.

What I can say honestly is that the question never fully closes for me. I do not wake up each morning newly convinced. Some weeks the case for staying feels obvious. Other weeks, usually around the third power cut of the day, it does not feel obvious at all. I have just decided to keep asking the question seriously instead of either burying it or treating one answer as final.

If you are somewhere in the middle of that same question right now, deciding whether to jakpa or whether to stay, I am not going to tell you what the answer should be. I am suspicious of anyone who claims they can. What I would ask, gently, is the same thing I had to ask myself. Not whether it is good there, wherever there is for you. But what could be done, by you specifically, with what is actually in front of you.

That is the only question I have ever found useful enough to stay for.