The Attitude Lounge with Kodwo Brumpon: The genius next door

“Water obtained by begging does not quench thirst.” – African proverb

For many Ghanaians, the mention of ‘Silicon Valley’ or ‘Shenzhen’ gets us wondering when Ghana will channel her energy into building such a technological hub. We seem to be waiting for a massive factory or a government-led tech city to save us.

But if you look closely at the grease-stained hands of a mechanic in Suame Magazine or the tactical precision of a hawker in the 37-Interchange traffic, you will realize the revolution has already arrived. It just is not wearing a suit.

The barrier is not a lack of vision; it is a deeply ingrained psychological filter that has been centuries in the making. We have been conditioned to look for genius in specific places, usually a corporate research hub, or in a uniform, like a graduation gown or a three-piece suit, and in a specific language, English.

The result is that we perceive the Suame mechanic as a fallback option rather than a frontline engineer. We have been taught that intelligence is something you prove with a certificate, not something you demonstrate with a wrench.

To add to that perception, we often confuse neatness with competence. So, when a person’s hustle is messy, loud, and covered in engine oil, we are quick to categorise it as ‘poverty’ rather than ‘process.’ But we need to appreciate that innovation is rarely clean.

Silicon Valley’s famous ‘garage’ origin stories are celebrated as gritty and heroic, but when that same grit happens in a kiosk in Abossey Okai, we label it ‘informal’ and move on. We lack the cultural vocabulary to see a cluttered workshop as a laboratory.

What we have in our country is a sprawling ecosystem where thousands of self-taught mechanics strip down, repair, and reassemble complex machinery. There are no blueprints here, and few formal degrees. Instead, they practice an iterative design process that would make any ‘intelligent visionary’ weep with joy.

Our artisans do not just fix cars, they re-engineer them to survive our pot-holed roads. They are what the ‘developed’ world economists would label ‘hackers,’ taking the finished products of global conglomerates and adapting them to local realities. This is authentic research and development funded by sweat and driven by a relentless instinct for utility over theory.

When a mechanic modifies a suspension system to handle our unique potholes, he isn’t just “patching” it; he is performing applied materials science. He is localizing technology. The tragedy is not that this type of hustle exists.

It is that we have failed to build the ‘on-ramps’ to turn this micro-genius into macro-economic power. For too long, we have been treating the street entrepreneur as a nuisance to be cleared or a taxable unit to be squeezed, rather than as the primary engine of our national growth.

It is about time we stopped viewing the hustle as a safety net for those who did not get formal education. It is, in fact, the greatest training ground we have. The goal of policy should not be to eliminate the hustle, but to formalize its brilliance through digital integration.

We need to move from that survival to sovereignty attitude by telling our own stories with the same gravity we give to others. When a foreigner hacks a rocket, it becomes a global headline for us. But when a Ghanaian artisan hacks a diesel engine to run on local fuel alternatives, we just seen as making do.

Part of this attitude is the flaw of our media and academic frameworks to document, name, and archive these local innovations. To this end, we do not study the Suame methods, in our universities, because we have assumed it has no academic or scientific value. It is not surprising that we have not improve their methods.

Then we come to the most damaging part. Since most of our local genius is expressed in our local dialects of Twi, Ga, Ewe, or Hausa, we downplay them as unintelligent. Why? Our definition of intelligence is strictly tied to English proficiency.

If a genius mechanic cannot explain the laws of thermodynamics in English, we assume he does not understand them, even if he is successfully manipulating those very laws to keep a thirty-year-old truck moving.

To see the genius, we must change the success metric. We need to start asking ‘what problem did you solve today?’ instead of ‘where is your degree?’ That would make us recognise the prodigies around us and also inspire the genius in all of us…

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