General

Speaking of millions of millionaires, I am not tone-deaf to the billions of people currently suffering from the harsh economic effects of this pandemic. I am merely recognising the fact that I can almost confidently say that you reading this article right now is into some form of “business”, or at least you have seriously thought of it. Looking at the current times, who hasn’t?  This pandemic has transformed everyone into businesspeople. Selling at a slightly higher price than you buy is the simplest form of “business” that a lot of people are looking to do to make up for lost income. The technical word for that is TRADE. Everyone’s a trader now. From selling facemasks to peddling mansions at “giveaway prices”, everybody seems hot. There’s massive interest now in generating alternative income now. Even the well-educated and well-to-do are adopting the hustler’s attitude. That’s a great thing! It is the recognition of this fact, coupled with the pan-African side of me that lead me to say that if people come to understand the utility of an African Continental Free Trade Area, they will make millions of it! Of course, the complexities of setting up the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is largely understated if you go by what you’ll read in this article. All things get quickly complicated in the geopolitical landscape. AfCFTA presents the idea of creating an infrastructure to support intra-African trade and economic collaboration. This article is about the glorification of that idea, and will say nothing about the efficacy of its execution. So don’t shoot the messenger.  It’s really hard not to support the idea of being able to seamlessly trade next door as opposed to overseas. Initiatives like AfCFTA identify the need to promote entrepreneurial capitalism within Africa as an escape from suffering. If properly marketed and if information dissemination efforts prove effective, I can see how many Africans will transform into business tycoons, in time. Let’s take a look at China. China has become the country with the most number of millionaires, with 4.4 million millionaires. When I first read about this late last year, I wondered how a communist country can rake up such a statistic. If we will all admit, the word “communist” doesn’t readily ginger up sentiments of individual riches. But as the facts currently stand, 100 million Chinese citizens make up the top 10% of the richest people in the world. THINK ABOUT IT: even a communist country like China must release a big enough dose of capitalism to fuel their campaign of being a powerful world market economy. Supply and demand has always been simple to understand but without the supporting infrastructure, you end up having an Africa that has all the supply but she exports way too much out of the continent when the demand can be met within ourselves, evidenced by importing way too much as well. Take Salt for example. The Ghana Export Promotion Council (GEPC) once identified Salt as important for the diversification of Ghana’s economy. One of the biggest purchaser of Salt is our friend Nigeria. Nigeria imports almost all of its Salt from Brazil. Ghana and Senegal together produce about 350,000 tonnes of Salt annually, and can do much more. If you want an oversimplification of AfCFTA, then see it as the scenario where Ghana can sell this Salt to Nigeria with very little wahala from import tariffs and border issues. As the mantra suggests, it’s to create a One African Market. My work with Agricultural Commodities Trading has indeed highlighted the fact that there are many people in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Nigeria and many other African countries that are operating with significant amounts of working capital but have very little grasp of basic concepts that are necessary for effective trading, like turnover and costing. But trading is how Africa thrives. Trading come naturally to us; it’s in our nature. Even without a strong grasp of the basic concepts aforementioned, millions of Africans continue to thrive doing business and possess skills that cannot be taught in classrooms. This is why it will not be enough for our leaders to have a political agreement and call it a win. Like earlier stated, nothing is simple in geopolitics. But to businessmen, life has to be straightforward and towards one goal: profit. With the current spike in the interest of people to become entrepreneurs, the size of our prospective “Private Sector” just ballooned. For AfCFTA to be a certified hit, the people of the private sector need to be actively engaged because their level of involvement would indicate the efficacy of the initiative. That is why it is important to have headlines like “How the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) could create millions of African Millionaires.” I don’t think Ama the Instagram slayqueen is aware that the crochet top she’s pushing on Facebook to Ghanaians has 50 million potential customers in Nigeria that she can very easily sell to when AfCFTA is implemented. Public education on AfCFTA and support for the initiative is important. Granted, the mention of “open market” brings with it the usual concerns but these concerns with AfCFTA have been seen before. Towards the end of the 1980’s, when the European Commission needed to convince member states and their citizens to accept their Single Market Programme, it was not an easy task. There were some countries that were concerned about opening up their markets, not too unlike Nigeria’s brief hesitation to join AfCFTA. To curb the fears and concerns for the Single Market Programme, Researchers in Europe published in 1988 what would later become “The Cecchini Report”, a detailed research into the cost of “Non-Europe”, putting a value on what’s actually at stake. This Report opened the eyes of critics and became the foundation and intellectual debate for a united Europe in commerce, paving the way for the Single Market Program being implemented on January 1st, 1993. You can make the case of increased competition from open markets dampening the chances of local markets to thrive, but a

Oh no… I’m not self-promoting for your employment. Please, there’s a far simpler explanation for the header and headline: it’s clickbait. This is a much more attractive heading than ‘ways to apply for a job’. I expect this article heading to stand out and make you want to read at least a couple lines. THIS is the kind of attitude that I feel is needed in these dire times if you seek a hire. It’s an absolute fact that if you seek to be employed during a pandemic, impressing your prospective employer is a definite must. Remember when many Ghanaians joked “June deɛ kwata kwata”? Yeah well it’s July. The threat of coronavirus is still very much alive and many business sectors are still unsure of how this pandemic will affect sales in the coming months, even years. Most employers are much more concerned with survival than expansion. Most employers are much more concerned with reducing salary expenditures and how to beef up or maintain sales numbers.  You (or your business) now more than ever need to stand out. Unemployment rates have skyrocketed around the world and these last few weeks, we’ve had way more people walk into our building asking to meet our officers for some “urgent business” only to realise it’s to plea for employment. I have personally met more than a couple. Still, BUSINESSES HAVE NEEDS even during COVID-19 and if you concentrate on those three words (“businesses have needs”), all you have to do is convince the guy signing the cheques that you deserve one, and yes even during a pandemic. Alan hired this very expensive sales manager and I was so confused until I realised it was for only one reason: the guy proves to be able and actually is beefing up sales numbers. So you CAN get hired during these times. There’s a pandemic. The default answer before you ask is a big NO. So if you have the chance at changing it to a yes, recognise the opportunity in the context of present times and make the most of it. Here’s what I think impressed me or would have impressed me during the last few weeks. Practice before we meet. I realised many of them did not know what to do; with their hands, with their briefcase or purse, even with their heads. This awkwardness gives you away as being uncomfortable in the setting. If you have one shot at a meeting with a would-be employer, prepare, practice practice practice every move, every detail, and nail that meeting. Breathe in, sit down, adjust your balance and make eye contact. These things are easier when you practised it many times before. Many might say “…but with time I will be better”. Not many have been willing to take that chance before all this, how much more now. It’s this kind of thinking you should do away with. Others were very fluid in their speaking but you can clearly sense the “I was just passing by and decided to try my luck” vibe. That leads me to my next point. Customise the message. What our Group would requires in, say, our Business Development Department, would be different from other companies’ needs. Don’t generalise the message. Don’t sound like you’re reading from a textbook. This isn’t your usual job market. Something is different and it’s that many more people are saying what you’re saying to who you’re saying it to. Find a way to convey the message of “I was born to work here” and it’ll increase your chances. I don’t mean to say do that the arrogant way. I mean, let employers know that you know the company more than the next guy. Don’t make simple, avoidable mistakes. One guy had his resume dated July 2019. That threw me off. I didn’t even know resumes came with dates at the top-right corners. Grammatical errors are total turn off as well. Again there’s a much greater need that you stand out. Simple avoidable mistakes like this give your application a bad feel. Answer the simple question of “what can you do”. The keyword there is ‘can’. In a tumultuous job market, what you have been doing and/or what you prefer to do should all take a back seat. What CAN you do? Weaponize your other abilities if the present ones you’re used to don’t work. My wife, through online courses, got some IT training many years ago and she kept building on it. Working from home due to the pandemic freed up some time and I am surprised to find out she’s getting paid for IT work on the side, because she’s in Finance. If you have other abilities, start bringing it to the forefront. Show me the money! Instead of telling me to try you and see, why not lead me to exploring exactly what I will see within a specified time frame. I believe that’s what Alan’s new Sales Manager did. “Do not pay me now, but let me work with you and within one week, if I am allowed to do A and B, I believe I bring the company C and D”. Use this tactic if you are sure you are THAT good and only need one shot to showcase what you have. Because most often, nobody knows, and nobody cares like you do. Speaking of this… Nobody knows what you can do. Nobody cares like you do. It’s a harsh reality. A few of them spoke like if I googled them I would find everything I needed right on page 1. Well, as good as you might be, I probably don’t know you. And in these times, most employers are distracted with keeping the ship afloat. Like I earlier said, in these times, the default answer is NO. In order to beat this situation, you’d have to empathise with the guy sitting in front of you. Place yourself in the shoes of someone that doesn’t understand that he or she needs you. Take your time to explain what your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is. Beforehand, take your time to craft what your

Desensitisation, in this regard, is the phenomenon where the same people in our Ghanaian society that were very much concerned about the impact and threat of the novel coronavirus on our health and livelihood at large, have developed a much weaker emotional response to current COVID-19 issues. This is definitely partly due to the fact that, when we receive continual messages about the dangers of the COVID-19 over a long period of time, this inadvertently contributes to our desensitisation. I fell victim to this yesterday… to the desensitisation thingie, not coronavirus. This is an opinion piece. I remember Foster telling me how he had shopped for two whole months’ worth of food in preparation for the lockdown, and me thinking “well that means I have to shop for three months’ worth of food if he’s is shopping for two… gotta be extra prepared”. This was late March, when COVID paranoia was at its peak, and for good reason too.  The first day I returned to the office after the lockdown got lifted, I was in full hazmat-mode: I had gloves on… and spare gloves for my spare gloves for my other spare gloves… I wore an N95 face mask with an additional half a dozen spare masks on standby for if someone were to touch my worn mask… and about a gallon of hand sanitizer in very short reach for good measure. Got hospital grade disinfectant for the office too. I mean, you can never be too careful in these times, right?  Right. Fast forward to yesterday and I instinctively got slightly frustrated when Alan’s receptionist insisted very firmly that I go back and grab a face mask from the car before going up to see him. Why was frustration my initial reaction and not gratefulness for reminding me to safeguard my own life? During my walk back to the parking lot, I wondered the extent to which we as a people are getting desensitised to the threat of COVID-19. Over the weekend, the President of Ghana mandated the Police to enforce the wearing of face masks in public. This is in response to the recent spike in the number of confirmed cases, amongst other matters. We need to all follow this instruction because a lot of people have been paying much more attention to the sanitiser part of the solution than the face mask part, moi inclusive, regrettably. Sanitisers are good. They keep your hands clean and as long as you don’t touch your face, and contaminated surfaces that you come into contact with do not get to infect you. That’s all well and good. Still, you need the face mask, maybe even more than the hand sanitisers. Let me explain. When someone is infected, the virus responsible named the Sars-CoV-2 virus will hijack the cells of the living person and begin to replicate itself. As it continues to make copies of itself in the infected body, it will eventually reach the cells in the lungs. When multiplication of the Sars-CoV-2 virus in the cells reach a certain point, the newly made viruses will burst out of the cells and become suspended in your bodily fluids. An example of your bodily fluids is whatever watery droplets that come out when you cough or speak. When an infected person coughs, they are basically spraying tiny infected droplets known as aerosols into the air, and that’s not even the scary part. One single cough from an infected person can produce up to 3000 droplets. So unless both your nostrils come with its own naturally-made sanitising filter that protect you against the tiny infected aerosols suspended in the air that you might breathe into your lungs, WEAR YOUR FACE MASK! It gets scarier! There have been reports that asymptomatic transmissions contribute to about 50% to 80% of COVID-19 confirmed cases. It means infected people that are not actively coughing or showing any signs of illness are transmitting the most. We have been so desensitised that we seem to forget easily that these should trigger us to be more vigilant. You won’t be able to readily tell if someone is sick. It gets even scarier!! Valentyn Stadnytskyi, Philip Anfinrud, Adriaan Bax and Christina E Bax. These four published a study concluded that COVID-19 can, in some instances, be transmitted through speech… THROUGH SPEECH!! Study showed that just uttering the words “stay healthy” sprays thousands of invisible droplets. Why wouldn’t you want to wear a face mask? Protect yourself. Sound out “stay healthy” from your own lips and you’d find that it is very possible to spray very tiny droplets saying those two words. At this very moment as I’m typing these words, which is Friday 19th June 9:21am, the Ghana Health Service website reports of 12,929 confirmed cases, which will surely rise to over 13,000 confirmed cases by the time this gets published Monday morning. THIRTEEN THOUSAND is very far from the just TWO confirmed cases that Ghana’s Health Minister Kwaku Agyemang-Manu announced on the 12th of March. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has this clipart that showed how one infected person infects 2.5 people on average in 5 days, and 406 others within 30 days. I believe the current spike in the number of confirmed cases is as a result of us not following the recommended safety measures like social distances and the wearing of face masks. The Government of Ghana is experiencing her fair-share of a beatdown due to the pandemic. Less than a year ago, Ghana was continuously touted as the rising shining star from West Africa, literally one of Africa’s fastest growing economies in the region. But due to this pandemic, businesses were closed and with that came a myriad of fiscal issues. The recently published Fiscal Developments Report of the Bank of Ghana showed that our country lost out on GH¢3.6 billion during the months of January, February and March. The figure came from the estimated national revenue and grants inflow of GH¢13.9 billion as against the reduced actual inflow of GH¢10.4 billion. GH¢3.6 billion could have funded a lot of national projects. I also think the aviation sector has taken the worst beating