Dear Sam Jonah
“Lives of great men oft remind us as we o’er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us — Letters that we ought to burn.” Thomas Hood
On the 7th June 2025, Academic City University had a graduation ceremony for its students. Distinguished personality Sir Sam Jonah delivered the commencement speech as it also marked a special milestone for the institution for having received their Presidential Charter in the year before (2024). The speech as reported by a media company is accessible through this link. If for any reason the link is inaccessible, kindly access it through a document saved presentation.
Dear Sir Jonah,
As Ghanaians, we are socialised to say “please” when talking to our elders. This communication culture can amuse or invite criticism from some individuals from other parts of the world. With a wild guess, I think they wonder whether free thought can be expressed in our kind of ‘pleasing’ statements. I did think about what I will write in this letter and the number of please words I need to state to a statesman. Maybe I stand the chance of still making my points without them but adding them may also matter to the devotees of politeness who will by all means encounter this in one way or the other. Kindly permit me to state it once to serve as a global constant throughout the letter to mitigate any variable offence. My simple intention is to stir our minds a little bit.
Please.
You talked about ship Captains somewhere in your speech I am about to discuss. My father was a seaman for much of his working life. He didn’t become Captain but he will tell me quite some intriguing things about the job as if he steered the ship. He did this through letters and later conversations to me whiles on his travels. I often wondered how he didn’t have fear for the sea, for I have. His fear was rather for a son who approached letter writing mechanically predictable to say the least. I wasn’t matching his text energy in meticulous choice of topics. As it is what it is, the combined letters I have received from family and friends in my entire school education is less than the sum of speeches you have given to schools. Unlike the sea, it turned out my fear for writing has reduced and taken on a life jacket of a certain kind of reflection and technicality. My first open letter was in 2023 to the billionaire and acclaimed film director of the record award winning movie Titanic, James Cameron. In it, I critiqued the sequel to his much talked about record making movie Avatar. He will get another open letter if the third Avatar movie isn’t good (enough for me). On the other hand, I don’t dream of writing to you multiple times for I don’t believe what I am about to discuss is a movie. The reality of my life is that this is my second open letter. I will try my best to make it count.
The youth have really been at the center of multiple discussions in the country for a very long time. The churches are feeling the pressure of a demographic looking for purpose, enterprises are complaining of what they bring to the table, politicians don’t seem to know the policy sophistication to bring the best out of them whiles developed nations take in the dividends of an intelligent immigration policy they have setup. It is true a lot needs to be desired. You have talked about national ideals a few times and it is always expected you will touch on the youth when given the chance. On the 7th of June, you thought it wise to once again touch on the issues of the youth on the theme “Future-Ready Leadership for Nation Building” for some graduating students at Academic City University. You delivered 10 keys to transform Ghanaian youth into nation builders. Cape Coast University and Ashesi University, two institutions with different education approaches which you are highly connected to, have also received such topical speeches from your experience. However good your speeches, it seems we keep hearing the same thing from others as well and expecting a big difference. Can we tell the problem differently?
We live in an attention economy which is growing by the billions every year. The attention economy is fast monetising every aspect of our hierarchy of needs of our society at a speed computation is catching up on. It can be baffling which is more expensive, whether to price what will get you to self-actualisation or just think about the immediate need of the roof over your head. That is short term common sense survival options meeting long term end goal achievement options. It is even more confusing to the average youth when the socialisation structures doesn’t aid clarity of thought or tunnel vision (enough). Our culture, economy and entire national identity has so much technical debt, it’s as if no matter how you start to solve something, you have not yet started for there’s so much to unbundle and bundle. Then comes the question, what does advice do to the Ghanaian mind? There stands a chance of three possible answers in this ‘Section A’ of how life may test us here. The first, maybe some advice touches Ghanaians and they live their life with it. The second, some Ghanaians like to hear advice and want it to be a part of their lives but they have reasons not to. The third group of Ghanaians wouldn’t want to listen to advice. It is constant shading for a majority of the youth in this life as they look around to what family and friends are also doing in this examination hall. Your 10 key advice said a lot to the batch of graduating students for which much of it is character driven. I am not going to touch on your keys, but I want to open 3 windows to seeing the youth problem differently. With your reading permission, I start the ‘Section B’ asking why most youth are not that character driven?
Ghanaian youth don’t really understand who a billionaire is.
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On several occasions, I have debated with friends stating the notion Ghana has no United States dollar billionaire. They wouldn’t agree with me and mention a lot of names to counter. I have heard multiple names ‘get money pass’ other multiple names several times. “Oh! Sam Jonah no get money!”. I have actually argued for your case study on several occasions by asking whether they understood your pay package when you left AngloGold Ashanti? Whether they know you moved to South Africa to make some investments in the energy and mining sector of which diversified your assets? Whether they know you are into real estate by some magnitude? The caption is not to put you forward in your own letter. On the other hand, I found out most youth cannot deconstruct you to even have a ‘wild guess’ of what you are made of. The youth are put under the spot of how they understand valuations, business models, share structures that determine billionaires, how financial worth doesn’t mean exact cash in the bank among other things. You might be tempted to think I am about to talk about financial literacy but it isn’t so. I want to see a little bit further and talk about values literacy, but not in a church pulpit stance style. It is my humble opinion being time conscious, disciplined, honest and more don’t necessarily build you wealth. Don’t get me wrong to be talking in absolutes or wanting to wade into evolutionary psychology. I will depict within a lighter context that the action of not looking over your shoulders in an exam doesn’t mean the questions on its own will do one a favour. Independent processes still stand in the exam as a whole and will want to be impressed. On top of this, the universe finds a way to remind humanity life is not all about exams, other things matter. In this, great entrepreneurs or billionaires strive to be ahead in values searching to get to their very challenging goals. There comes something different they allow in their workplace or don’t tolerate. What Elon Musk looks for is different from Mark Zuckerberg, and so the likes of what Oprah Winfrey looks for is different from Bill Gates, Dangote, Abramovich, Jeff Bezos and others. They show intensity in different values. That is what their fan base, investors, customers and those that study them bank on. If a society is not able to deconstruct its richest for what really matters, then the understanding of wealth and value creation becomes constricted to the lane of there’s not much to learn, we just have to make (any) money. Not that particular value intensified, but rather, materialism intensified.
Ghanaian youth are starting families early
Our society has a certain waterfall approach to life. This mainly involves getting educated to the tertiary level, get a job or start a business and get married or start a family. I wish I could put this side by side some selected countries but it mustn't be so long a letter. I agree there is a Ghanaian way of doing things and this has helped shaped some trailblazers in the country. One English author and philosopher, G. K. Chesterton, who has ever been referred to as the prince of paradox once said a real problem only occurs when there are admittedly disadvantages in all courses that can be pursued. Simply put, our approach to life also has some disadvantages. I may have to clarify some assumptions void of data and figures but please don’t let Bright Simmons know about this. By Ghanaian youth, I am referring to persons at most 40 years. By starting a family, I mean having children inside or outside marriage. By early, I mean before the age of 35 years. Of course, I am open to any margin of error indication in my thought process or welcome pedestrian confirmation from anyone. The disadvantage I am talking about is this. The Ghanaian youth is more likely to be told to settle down (start a family) than start a risky innovative business that has a chance of creating a lot of jobs and wealth. They are told to start early and finish early, avoid pension babies, couple can join minds together, one can build a business after marriage and so on. The reality is that responsibilities and cognitive load grows more to be able to undertake certain entrepreneurial pursuits after starting a family. Extended family functions increase for one, child expenses must be planned for, permanent accommodation must be planned for, retirement plan headaches on standby and more. This means that a lot may not avail themselves to go through the mill of getting a business idea to product market fit even though the chances of financial freedom is bigger. A lot more youth will settle on job security which gives a certain comfort zone and not afford them the classroom of important values to learn. Even for those who enter into established organisations, they become lax about intrapreneurship pursuits for they find themselves in some level of comfort zone too. You mentioned some good names in your speech that the youth might emulate. These people were young, wild and free (of distractions) at the backdrop of intelligent national public policies and well promoted private capitalist agendas. The amount of figuring out to do in our part of the world is no joke if you don’t have much time on your hands. The youth are trusting the process but there are trade offs.
Inadequate informal education systems
I know you can afford to watch football from any part of the world despite not knowing the team you support or heard you talk about football. Nevertheless I think you’ve made time to watch the football of our national team through out the years. I don’t know whether you share in the modern complaint that there’s something missing about our football team. For some of us football fans, the trend is more noticed when we also do all sorts of comparisons when international players return to their native countries to perform. Of course, they are not perfect and can disappoint their national fans but we notice most times the bar can be that low for our country. Hunger for performance feels transactional and knowledge for the game feels depreciated most times. Fans share their déjà vu even before the déjà vu happens. Almost everyone is on the urge of telling someone “I told you so”. It seems as if someone takes a flight, they raise their game, when they come home they seem to get into a different mentality. Out of football, this trend is wide and applicable to different parts of our social and economic life. I believe the youth tend to be interested in giving their best outside the country too. I believe it is not all about the money but the exposition of cultural systems comes to play. The school system can’t impact everything. The culture of applause, giving someone direction, maintaining something, letting people have their benefit, communal contribution understanding and sticking to what makes your country different among many other things contributes a lot as much as education certificates. We lack nationalistic ideals through the family system leaving a lot of pressure and expectation on the formal education system. Some opinions form to think that the youth don’t ‘respect’ and some significant blame is given to the formal education system often. There is a thinking that continuously tweaking our education system will bring us national success, leaving the informal education system to be neglected in its development. It is easy to blame it on the proliferation of phones and the power of the internet on us. We must know the countries who have brought such technologies to us, highly influence and manage national content for their youth. Chances are that the youth in the decline of learning their own languages and not attentive to been socialised may not buy into a national agenda. Despite it takes a village to raise a child, they will mostly think they are on their own.
I can’t do more paper in this section up to this point. My apologies for your long reading for I have taken so much of your busy time discussing more problems though we’ve not got to 99 yet, something Jay-Z has rapped and wrapped his head around before. Why not, I fathom a day when you will no longer be with us. It will be an end of an era of a lot of positive things about you. The painful truth is that our elders are leaving us one after the other. Some go with all their knowledge undocumented to say the least. We have heard rocking news in several media announcements on many occasions. I take solace that good Ghanaian inspiration is still out there for the youth to find in our mounting loss. Who will be our next Sir Sam Jonah? If he is growing up in Ghana, I ask myself what is he facing? Who is he talking to? What is he browsing? What is he overthinking and even what type of girlfriend is he having? We can only wish that person in the making doesn’t give up to setbacks you personally faced for your kind of class is permanent and we will like to have it with us always.
To end on a note of prayer, it is my wish one day Ghana’s national day of prayer and fasting be handled differently for just one day. Drop the ‘boring’ prayer topics and ask God for something a little unusual. I suggest Sam Altman be mentioned through our loud speakers. He once tweeted an unknown young person is up to something that will change the world one day. Let’s hope in his humility, he may not be talking about himself and that good tidings may visit a country like ours. Tongues speaking, we must pray loudly a Ghanaian youth may manifest his tweet. Ghanaians may say ‘ei!’ or amen to this if murmuring doesn’t happen to change the prayer request. Before I implore you to say a certain kind of amen, I encourage you to try and meet Ghanaian musician Ko-jo Cue and invite him to share the work behind one of my favourate albums of his, For My Brothers. I think it is the best album about some issues on the Ghanaian youth and part of the inspiration to write this.
Shall we hear a loud amen from you Sir?
Respectfully,
Dziedzom Ocloo.
Son of Kwamegah and Mansa
Son of Ghana
Son of Africa
Citizen of the World
