Life in 'obi-man so'.......is it very easy to make it there?
My Two Cents on Moving Abroad Worth the read Okay now the good old question! I’ll give an honest answer and please pay attention.
When you are in Ghana as a graduate or as a young man you take a lot of things for granted! There are several avenues to make millions in Ghana but we the youth tend to complain most of the time instead of taking advantage of the opportunities that abound in Ghana.
So we seek to leave for greener pastures, we work assiduously towards leaving a system that we believe is broken back in Ghana! We end up here and we are much more productive and disciplined than we were back in Ghana, we pay our rent on time, we obey the laws, keep the streets clean, we do not jay-walk! We pay our taxes and we strive to make more money to build a better life.
The life in obi-manso is very different and we come here with a determined focus to make a better life for ourselves and so we follow all the laid down rules, and use the systems and structures to our advantage!
Now here is the interesting part. We tend to complain a lot about systems, structures and about other things in Ghana but what we fail to see is that just as we strive to come out here to make our lives better there are people out here who come to Ghana to make their lives better!
Example: When I completed KNUST with my degree in Engineering if anyone told me to venture into agriculture I’d have looked them with disdain and spewed a few words of disrespect to them. Little did I know that the specific areas that we ignored back in Ghana are the avenues that will make us richer - far richer than being out here. Just like a friend said - The monies are in the gutters in Ghana! And yes, that’s the truth the monies are in the gutters in Ghana!
If you strive to work hard in Ghana with the same drive you have here in the west, your life will be better and the good thing is this time its home not in a foreign land! Now out here - you live two lives, you work so hard to pay your bills here and also work so hard to build a life in Ghana. You get tired of the rat race out here and you start looking for opportunities back home that will make you loads of money and you are up one morning and find out you were living a lie when you were in Ghana.
The opportunities you ignored back home and the things you took for granted all begin to make sense and you pick up a pen and a paper and you draft a small business plan - you realize that if you have 2000 poultry layers that’s 2000 eggs every day, in a month of 30 days that’s 60,000 eggs, which is 2000 crates sold at 20 GhC per crate so you do the maths and you find that, with 2000 chicks you will make 40,000 GhC ($7000) per month in revenue! You take out your expenses = 40% of revenue and you realize that your profit every month is roughly $4000. Then you bow your head in shame, you curse and you scream wishing you were not stupid back when you were home! You look back and you say, what if I had started with just 100 birds and worked harder, you’d have had 10,000 birds by now and that will be 200,000 revenue with 120,000 GhC profit every month.
That’s monies you may not get out here! So you work even harder to setup a business back home in Ghana, and you strive to come home to take all these opportunities you left behind! One thing becomes clear to you! You at least didn’t waste time in Ghana, the drive that pushed you to come out here to hustle is the same drive that is making you realize how there a lots of opportunities in Ghana but you ignored them. But at least now you know, and now you will take advantage of these opportunities that abound to make your life better and just like a friend of mine told me here - in his own words, when I went back home, all my friends that I left behind are doing fabulous better than me, I asked what they do and he said just retail, they buy cheap and sell with great profit margins. Yeah! You are always welcome here, just don’t get stuck up here broke like the many Ghanaians out here who are struggling to make ends meet!
