*By Napoleon Ato Kittoe
*The Scattering*
Everybody left the village to the city, to abroad, so the family is scattered. There is this jargon now, almost a cliché — “each person for himself” — because there isn’t enough to share.
So intense are pressures on providers for families that they end up crashed. The family has seriously gone selfish. The members are in competition and they don’t help build the other. There are also mistrust and superstitions amongst them, thus instead of helping they rather avoid those members in the family in need.
Some of the causes and manifestations are well-known but lately aggravated and whitewashed. In sampling the factors, one of the lowest hanging fruits is the conventional thought that the mass departures from their roots have placed our grandfathers and grandmothers in dominance in the countryside. Now not anymore, as the sheer numbers of the youth everywhere outnumber the oldies.
But foot traffic is necessary for the petty trades plied by the large numbers for survival, hence their pull to the urban areas.
Some fly out of the country when they consider the system offering only limited opportunities. The distances those movements cover are driven by the belief of the pastures being greener on the other side.
*The Grass Is Not Greener*
When they arrive, they find the grass not greener but just different. In the cities, rent eats income. Overseas, loneliness eats the heart and the man who left now cannot provide for himself let alone send to the extended family he left behind.
So he stops calling. He stops sending. Not because he is wicked, but because he is in need. At this time, the gap is so widened that the rest of the family has learned not to be in need of the family’s overseas-based man.
The grannies face the empty compounds and family meetings no longer meet. The farms are no longer farmed. The youth in the villages mirror their counterparts in cities. They are busy bodies — no time for traditional lifestyle.
We have whitewashed this. We still post family first on social media. We still wear matching clothes to funerals. When back at home, each for himself. We have painted the walls white without fixing the cracks.
Many of family members abroad don’t even attend funerals of their close relatives who died in their countries of origin. Going by the logic already established in this passage, it means they stayed aloof to the predicaments that saw the living off to the land of the dead.
*Distance That Communication Could Not Close*
Advanced communication tools which have many advantages have flip sides too and they include maintaining the distance boundaries amongst scattered family members.
Sometimes some who are so much detached from their roots make sudden appearance but with ulterior motives. They want to win parliamentary elections so they rediscover and retrace steps whose footprints are long erased like unidentifiable corpses that are defaced in expanse of time. Such ambitions usually hit brick walls. The people do not know them.
*Poor Wages, Remittances & The Uncle System*
Bitingly true is the poor wages in the country which don’t augur well for extended families as there will be no surplus left on salaries first expended on nuclear families.
An archivist, diaspora specialist, and a development architect, Prof. Kwame Addo refers to Ghanaians in the diaspora as the seventeenth region of Ghana. The Government of Ghana also points to foreign remittances by Ghana’s diaspora community as huge. They are able to trace this in the formal money transfer system but we do not know yet whether their portfolios touch extended family members.
Ashantis have a beautiful culture which veritably depicts an extension of the extended family. A mother’s brother who is an uncle anchors nephews and nieces like biological fathers if not more. Other ethnic groups also touch each other in different ways but the Ashantis example is the standard I am most familiar with. Widening the scope, we cannot gloss over this. One Ashanti in Germany or Canada could be the hand that did the spade work for ten more to move there.
*Three Options To Conclude The Matter*
We have at least three options to conclude the matter.
*1. We can arrive at the conclusion that the extended family system is dead and we need to bury it honestly.*
We should stop whitewashing. Stop pretending. Let us admit the extended family is crashed, and build a new, smaller, honest family — nuclear, but with chosen brothers.
*2. The next option is to rebuild it but not with money.*
It will not be rebuilt by remittances or by funerals. It will be rebuilt by the uncle system — one person anchoring ten, one person helping the other build.
*3. The other option is to accept that the dynamics of times have crashed the provider.*
Until wages leave a surplus, until we stop expecting one person to anchor many people in a family, the family cannot rise. Multiply the providers to fix their families.
*A Proposal: Ministry Of Family Affairs*
Here, I propose that the government takes a look at the family system in Ghana. We must have a sector ministry called Ministry of Family Affairs.
The government through such a ministry can trace everybody to their roots. For instance, a criminal or social misfit could properly be investigated if households and extended families can state who their family members are and those they lost contacts with. Out of families, the State will find the decisive handles in the turbulences that engulf us.
Not only the bad news, the yoke may also have much good news to share. Let’s do it.
