More Than Just An Egg Sandwich

After a rain drenched bus ride to Tamale this morning, I decided to pull up for an egg sandwich and tea at one of the street vendors. The egg sandwiches are pretty uneventful (sometimes you get some onion, if you’re really lucky a little green pepper) and the tea is always loaded with way too much milk powder and sugar, but these days I consider them both about as close to godliness as food items can reasonably become. This might have something to do with the other ninety percent of my diet: maize and rice. I may be exaggerating a little here, but not much. Lots of maize and rice.

Regardless of how close egg sandwiches are to godliness, I got a little more than I bargained for at this particular meal (actually I didn’t bargain at all, street food seems to work on a fixed price basis). I sat down with a couple taxi drivers, also enjoying their own little slices of godliness, and before long the conversation turned to “my place” (Canada).

The men were surprised to learn that there are socio-economic levels in Canada. They asked me how I would know if someone was a rich man. I said he would drive a nice car and live in a big house. I think this answer was most shocking because of how familiar it was. To many in Ghana, becoming wealthy is equated with becoming more like people in the west. Those who can afford it (and probably more frequently those who can’t) purchase TVs, DVD players and mobile phones in an attempt to assume the ever coveted modern lifestyle that they believe everyone in the west enjoys. Just as many Canadians lump Africans into the category of helpless and poor, Ghanaians lump North Americans into the category of endlessly rich. Clearly the picture is hardly so black and white.

I continued by explaining that we even have homeless or street people, to which they nodded their understanding. “But”, they said, “you surely don’t have these mad people do you? You must keep them separate from society.” I said we do have mad people (those with mental illness), but that they usually receive some sort of government assistance. This must have hit a trigger, because one of the men got excited and exclaimed knowingly, “aww yes, government assistance.” Based on this and previous conversations, I get the impression Ghanaians feel that their government doesn’t help them enough, but that western governments provide all sorts of help to their citizens. In part this is true, Canada has a social safety net that just doesn’t exist in Ghana, but this is only possible because of our government’s taxation power. It’s pretty hard to collect income tax from a subsistence farmer.

Eventually we got to the specific prices of goods and services in both countries. We compared university tuition, which is about $2,500 a year in Ghana. I told them I pay $10,000 a year, but they were most wowed by the fact that tuition in the US can be up to $30,000 (this was my best estimate). They were surprised that we still have to pay our own electricity and water bills. I tried to explain the gas bill, but I think the concept of having to heat ones home was largely incomprehensible. The Canadian minimum wage really got them going; one man kept calculating how much he would make in a day, how much in ten days and so on. Most taxi drivers don’t own their vehicles and are lucky to take home $2-3 a day, so $8 an hour is pretty mind boggling.

The one commodity for which the price was consistent was fuel. The ramifications of this are huge. When most everything else is a fraction of the cost, including wages, the relative cost of fuel is GINORMOUS. Goods become more expensive the further you get away from urban centres and transportation costs rise. Recent increases in fuel prices are spurring previously manageable inflation in the country. Just about everything is getting more expensive, but wages are not increasing. The impact is felt particularly hard by taxi drivers. Passengers refuse to pay more, owners refuse to accept less profit and fuel prices are continuing to rise, leaving only the driver to absorb the cost.

Before I left I asked the men if they felt that development was happening in their country and if their situation was improving. They said, “you know if you’re doing well and have a good job it’s easy to see development happening, but when you’re just a poor man trying to make a life it’s often hard to see how anything is improving.”