There is a story that has lived in my mind for a very long time.
I first heard it at International Central Gospel Church, from Dr. Mensa Otabil. It was about a relay race.
Most of us understand how a relay race works. One runner covers their leg, then hands the baton to the next. Sometimes the runner who is tiring pushes a little past the exchange point. Sometimes the next runner steps back to receive it. Sometimes you gain a metre. Sometimes you lose one. But one thing never happens: the race does not start again from the beginning.
The baton is passed on.
That story stayed with me because it is not only about athletics. It is about families and generations.
Some parents are able to leave something behind for their children. A house. Land. A business. Or simply an education. Whatever it is, it gives the next generation a head start.
Other families cannot do that. The children grow up and find themselves not only building their own lives, but also carrying responsibilities that should have been carried by the previous generation. They take care of parents, pay bills, and start from scratch.
As Ghanaians and Africans, many of us know this story well. There is nothing wrong with supporting our parents. The Bible tells us to honour our father and our mother. It is beautiful.
There is also the other conversation about “spoon-feeding” versus good parenting. I will leave that for another day.
What I want to talk about today is what happened to that story years later, when I found myself in a lecture hall in the United States.
I love lectures because they throw you into rooms with people whose lives are completely different from yours. That day, the conversation was about schools. Specifically, about finding a type of paint that could last *one hundred years* on school buildings.
Not ten years. Not twenty. One hundred.
The logic was simple. If we paint these schools once and they last a century, then our children and grandchildren will not have to spend money repainting them. They can use those resources for something else.
As I sat there, it hit me: almost no one in that room would be alive in one hundred years. Yet they were making decisions for children they would never meet. For grandchildren they would never know. For generations not yet born.
People from China. Europe. Other parts of the world. For them, planning beyond your own lifetime seemed perfectly normal.
And I thought about Ghana.
I say this with some authority because I have worked inside government. I know how policies are developed. I know budgeting. I know planning. I know the committees, consultations, board meetings, technical working groups, and the enormous amount of public money that goes into designing policies before they are ever implemented.
People think politicians make everything happen. They don’t. The real work is done by technocrats. The public servants. The civil servants. The professionals who remain whether governments change or not. When they are allowed to work without political interference, many of them are exceptional.
They spend months, sometimes years, researching and designing policies for the country. All of this costs money. Our money. Taxpayers’ money.
That is why I struggle to understand what happens next.
Every four years, governments change. And simply because another political party started a programme, or because another administration will get the credit, years of planning are abandoned. Just like that.
The most obvious examples to me are in the creative sector, tourism and education, because those are the spaces I know best. But the same is true in agriculture. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love plants and farming. These days I can even call myself a plant entrepreneur.
The point is the same everywhere.
These policies do not belong to politicians. They belong to Ghanaians. They were developed by experts. They were paid for by the public. Many were already gaining momentum. Then we abandoned them.
Not because they failed. Not because they were harmful. But because somebody else started them.
Meanwhile, the people coming into government have just arrived. They do not yet know everything about the system.
That is why the baton exists.
The previous runner has already covered part of the distance. Your job is not to throw the baton away. Your job is to run faster. To improve it. To sharpen it. To carry it further than the person before you did. Not to walk back to the starting line and begin again.
But that is exactly what we keep doing.
And while we are busy returning to the starting line, the rest of the world keeps running. We keep marking time. Generation after generation.
The result is that our children inherit almost exactly what we inherited. Before they can build their own future, they must first spend years recovering lost ground.
It is the same family story. Only this time, the family is Ghana.
So perhaps as citizens we need to ask a difficult question: What right does any politician have to discard policies that belong to the nation?
Of course, not every policy is perfect. Some need review. Some need correction. Some may even need to be abandoned. But that should be the exception, not the culture.
Because every abandoned policy represents years of research, consultation, planning and public money that can never be recovered.
There is another cost too. A cost that never appears in any budget.
When good ideas are repeatedly abandoned, people stop believing that long-term thinking matters. The public becomes cynical. The technocrats become frustrated. Eventually someone proposes another bold national vision and the response is, “What is the point? The next government will cancel it anyway.”
Maybe that is the greatest cost of all.
I think about the Year Of Return. I think about Script Bank. I think about contracts, long-term strategies, national agendas. I think about so many ideas that were carefully developed, funded, and in some cases already being implemented. Many have simply come to a halt.
Think about the cost. The cost to Ghana. The cost to taxpayers. The cost to future generations. The cost to our grandchildren.
People say failing to plan is planning to fail. Perhaps there is another version: planning without continuity is also planning to fail.
Maybe it is time Ghana stopped thinking in four-year political cycles and started thinking in one-hundred-year national cycles.
Because every civilisation that has moved forward understood one simple truth: each generation begins where the previous generation stopped. They receive the baton. They protect it. They improve upon it. And then they hand it over in a better position than they found it.
As I reflected on all this, I realised something else. I received this baton of thought from Dr. Mensa Otabil many years ago. I have carried it across years and across oceans.
Perhaps today I am simply handing it on.
Because the baton is not passed only in relay races. It is passed in families. It is passed in classrooms. It is passed in governments. It is passed through ideas. It is passed through conversations like this one.
A nation that repeatedly throws away the baton, walks back to the starting line, and insists on beginning the race all over again should not be surprised when it keeps losing.
I just woke up thinking about this. And I couldn’t help feeling saddened by it.
