Restoring the Ethic of Maintenance: The Missing Link Between Progress and Sustainability

The Crisis of Neglected Maintenance

Every civilization that endures learns one truth early: development is not what you build, but what you can maintain. Nations do not fail because they cannot construct; they fail because they cannot preserve. Bridges rust, roads crumble, institutions decay — not from lack of resources, but from the death of an ethic: the ethic of maintenance.

In Ghana, neglect has been normalized as a form of politics. A new government would rather cut a ribbon than fix a road; a new minister would rather commission than maintain. Projects are conceived for the camera, not for longevity.

Hospitals are built with great ceremony, but years later their roofs leak and equipment lies idle. Public schools begin with painted slogans of “Free Education,” but the desks rot and textbooks never arrive. Streetlights work only for the first three months.

The real crisis is not fiscal — it is moral. We are addicted to construction because it symbolizes power, while maintenance demands discipline, patience, and continuity — qualities we have yet to reward politically.

Maintenance as the Mirror of Standards

The inability to maintain is the ultimate proof that standards never truly took root. A road that must be rebuilt every two years is not infrastructure; it is a recurring expenditure disguised as progress.

The same cultural indifference that tolerates crooked tiles and peeling paint in the private sector reproduces itself in public life. Ministries occupy buildings with broken elevators and filthy corridors, while the very departments tasked with urban management ignore the weeds growing outside their windows.

A society that does not maintain what it owns is a society that has not internalized value.

The Cost of Non-Maintenance

The economics are brutal.

Every cedi not spent on maintenance becomes ten cedis in future reconstruction. The World Bank once estimated that in developing countries, poor maintenance wipes out nearly 40 percent of infrastructure value within a decade. Ghana’s highways, bridges, and water systems bear witness.

But the deeper cost is psychological: citizens learn that nothing lasts. And when nothing lasts, people stop caring. Taxes feel futile; civic pride evaporates; corruption becomes rationalized as “every man for himself.”

That same structural disorder is visible even in the cities. Streetlights stripped for copper wire. Iron railings and signboards stolen for scrap. Pavement blocks dug up and sold. Traffic-exchange boxes turned into storage for hawkers’ goods. Medians overgrown with weeds and rotting billboards. These are not random acts of vandalism; they are symptoms of a society that has lost its sense of ownership — a chaotic social organization that no longer knows who is responsible for what.

When structure collapses, scavenging becomes the informal economy. In that climate, entrepreneurship cannot evolve; it merely hustles to survive.

This is how nations sink — not through war or famine, but through the slow corrosion of shared responsibility.

Why Businesses Mirror the State

Private enterprise does not escape this pathology.

Ghanaian firms — from factories to service shops — often replicate the same neglect. Machines are run to breakdown rather than serviced. Vehicles are repaired only after total failure. Office buildings decay while management awaits a “new project.”

It’s the same anti-maintenance instinct: the refusal to invest in continuity. Yet no economy grows without durability. The firms that dominate the global supply chain — Toyota, Siemens, Unilever — are not just innovators; they are masters of maintenance. Their competitive edge lies in process discipline and the capacity to sustain quality over time.

In Ghana, by contrast, the entrepreneur’s time horizon is short — a function of weak systems and unpredictable rules. Why plan for ten years when the environment may collapse in two? The absence of maintenance is therefore both a symptom and a rational response to institutional fragility.

Maintenance should become the moral language of modern Ghana — the proof that we have grown from a consuming to a conserving nation.

In the end, every broken streetlight and peeling wall is not just a technical failure; it is a metaphor for the state itself. A society that cannot fix a door will not fix its economy.

If Ghana is to rise, it must close the circle:

• Systems that make sense,
• Structures that enforce order,
• Standards that inspire excellence, and
• Maintenance that guarantees continuity.

That, and not slogans, is how nations climb from aspiration to achievement. Development is not an event. It is the steady maintenance of progress.

Morality, Discipline, and Aesthetic Order Are Economic Variables

Every society that takes off economically first experiences a moral awakening. It is the rediscovery that order is not a luxury; it is a cost-saving device. Economists call it “social capital,” political scientists call it “institutional trust,” and sociologists call it “civic virtue.” Whatever the name, the principle is simple: a nation that behaves well, performs well.

Let’s begin with what every Ghanaian experiences daily: lateness and unreliability.

A 2022 survey by the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) found that over 60% of small business owners cited “poor work ethic and unreliability of staff” as their top operational constraint — ahead of taxes and electricity. Think about that. Not finance, not policy — but punctuality.

It seems trivial until you add the arithmetic.

A construction site where masons show up late loses 1–2 hours per worker per day. Across a 100-man site, that’s 200 lost hours daily — the equivalent of 25 full-time workers idling. Scale that across Ghana’s 1.5 million small enterprises, and you begin to see the true macroeconomic cost of cultural indiscipline.

It’s not just “African time.” It’s lost GDP.

The Price of Corruption

Ghana’s corruption problem, measured by Transparency International’s 2023 Corruption Perception Index, placed the country at rank 70 out of 180, with a score of 43/100 — stagnating for five years. The monetary cost is staggering. The Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) estimates that corruption drains roughly 3 billion USD annually — about 5% of GDP.

But the deeper damage is not the money itself. It’s the cynicism it breeds — the collective sense that cheating is normal and honesty is naïve. When moral shortcuts become socialized, markets lose the one thing they depend on: trust.

A business environment where you must double-check every contract, monitor every supplier, and prepay for every service is a business environment where the cost of transaction exceeds the profit of production.

That is why moral order is not merely spiritual; it is profoundly economic.

And perhaps nothing illustrates this moral collapse better than our epidemic of speed ramps. Across the country, ordinary citizens pour concrete humps across public roads — some official, most not — because they no longer believe the state can enforce speed limits. Even the Accra–Takoradi Highway, meant to be a major economic artery, now bristles with bumps and rumble strips. Every one of them is a small, asphalt confession that authority has failed. What should be a smooth highway of commerce has become a physical metaphor for a nation slowing itself down because it cannot discipline its drivers or its institutions.

Walk through Accra or Kumasi and you’ll see another, subtler form of disorder — the collapse of aesthetic discipline. Billboards mushrooming over traffic lights, open drains beside bank headquarters, unpainted buildings beside luxury SUVs.

This is not just visual chaos; it is a signal to investors and citizens alike that no one is in charge.

Urban economists have shown that clean, orderly cities attract higher property values, better compliance, and stronger tax bases. In Singapore, for instance, rigorous urban maintenance and visual order boosted foreign investment inflows by over 25% between 1970 and 1980 — before the digital revolution even began.

By contrast, Accra spends millions of cedis annually on sanitation campaigns that achieve little because public conduct remains unchanged. According to the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources, Ghana spends nearly ₵246 million annually on urban waste collection, yet only 63% of waste is properly disposed of. The rest clogs drains, floods roads, and multiplies costs every rainy season.

Disorder, in short, is expensive.

In the 1970s, school inspections and civic clubs were central to Ghanaian public life. The “Environmental Health” officers patrolled neighborhoods, ensuring cleanliness, decency, and compliance. Civil servants were expected to look dignified and disciplined — not as vanity, but as symbolism: you represented the state.

Today, civic virtue has been replaced by cynicism. The public sector mirrors private mediocrity: lateness, nonchalance, cluttered offices, and a total lack of pride in public space.

And yet, when you study the trajectories of societies that made the leap — Japan in the 1960s, South Korea in the 1970s, Singapore in the 1980s — the pattern is unmistakable. Their economic revolutions began as moral revolutions. Citizens were mobilized to treat time, space, and duty as sacred.

When Morality Becomes an Economic Multiplier

Let’s put numbers to virtue.

• If public workers arrive at 8:00 a.m. instead of 9:30 a.m., Ghana gains roughly 150 million man-hours per year, equivalent to nearly 70,000 full-time jobs in productivity.
• If small businesses improved quality consistency by 10%, Ghana’s export rejection rate (currently about 18% for processed foods in EU markets, according to the Ghana Export Promotion Authority) would halve — generating an extra $200 million annually in export revenue.
• If sanitation compliance rose to 90%, Accra’s flooding-related clean-up costs — currently estimated at ₵100 million per year — would drop by two-thirds.

These are not moral abstractions; they are economic dividends of discipline.

How Aesthetic Order, Design, and Urban Taste Signal National Maturity

Economists rarely speak of beauty, yet every thriving city wears it like a balance sheet. Beauty is not decoration; it is order made visible. It signals competence, discipline, and foresight—the very virtues that markets reward and citizens respect.

Modern economics has learned that the look and feel of a place change the behavior of those who live and invest there. Researchers at the London School of Economics, studying 120 cities, found that a one-point improvement in urban cleanliness and aesthetic index correlates with a 7 percent rise in property values and 4 percent higher business density.

Accra has yet to internalize this. The city spends millions on roads and drains, but allows a visual environment of chaos—billboards competing for oxygen, cables dangling, kiosks sprawling onto pavements. The absence of aesthetic order tells the world that no one curates the commons. Investors notice.

Urban ugliness is expensive. Poorly planned signage distracts drivers; uncovered drains breed disease; unzoned structures raise insurance costs. The World Bank’s 2022 Urban Resilience report estimated that Ghana loses about ₵1.2 billion annually to flooding and sanitation failures—most of it preventable through better design and enforcement.

Compare that to Kigali, Rwanda: by enforcing strict design codes and public-space maintenance, the city has reduced flood-related losses by 60 percent in a decade while tripling tourist revenue. Order pays.

Our Visual Economy

In 2015 Accra Metropolitan Assembly estimated more than 22,000 outdoor advertising structures, 40 percent of them illegal. Each billboard hides a view, blocks a sign, or adds a distraction that feeds congestion. In design terms, Accra’s skyline is a spreadsheet gone mad.

The cost is subtle but measurable: urban stress. Traffic delays in Greater Accra average 108 hours per commuter annually, costing the economy nearly ₵5 billion in lost productivity. Much of that gridlock stems from visual and spatial clutter—no clear zoning, no enforced hierarchy of streets and signage.

A city that looks confused behaves confused.

Consider Kumasi’s old central market before its recent reconstruction. It was a marvel of commerce trapped in chaos—open wiring, ad-hoc stalls, fire hazards. The new Kejetia Market, though imperfect, demonstrates what coherent design can do: improved ventilation, order, hygiene, and safety. Vendors report sales up by roughly 30 percent, not because consumers became richer, but because environmental comfort increased trust.

Aesthetics, then, is not vanity—it is productivity infrastructure.

From Shacks to Statements

Ghana’s built environment reflects its moral psychology. We construct grand parliamentary buildings and allow their surroundings to decay; we pave motorways but ignore sidewalks. True modernity will arrive not when we import skyscrapers but when we insist that every kiosk, signboard, and streetlamp obey a rule of harmony.

Singapore did not become Singapore through GDP statistics alone—it became Singapore when it decided that neatness, greenery, and symmetry were forms of patriotism. In the same spirit, Ghana must learn that tidiness is an ideology of efficiency.

The Reality: A Path to Lasting Progress

Markets read signals. A city that cannot align its streetlights will not align its fiscal policy. Beauty, coherence, and discipline are not “soft” issues; they are public goods with economic returns. When a society keeps its spaces orderly, investors infer that it will keep its contracts orderly too.

Ghana’s next frontier, therefore, is not another industrial park or digital slogan. It is the quiet revolution of making the country look as serious as it wants to become. A beautiful Ghana would not merely please the eye; it would convince the mind that progress is irreversible.

The stolen railings, the dug-up pavements, the hawkers under bridges, the sleeping street girls, and the homemade speed bumps across national highways — these are not accidents of poverty. They are the symptoms of a broken structure. When systems fail, morality frays; when standards vanish, suffering multiplies.

If Ghana is to climb out of its current chaos, it must rediscover the basic grammar of civilization: systems that make sense, structures that enforce order, standards that insist on quality, maintenance that sustains progress, and morality that binds citizens into a common purpose.

When structure returns, standards hold.

When standards hold, entrepreneurship thrives. And when entrepreneurship thrives within order, development stops being a dream and becomes the country’s natural condition.

Until then, we will remain a nation of restless energy trapped in disorder — a place where everything moves, but nothing truly moves forward.

The measure of progress is simple:

Can we build something — a road, a business, a moral code — and keep it standing? That, more than any budget or slogan, is the test of a civilization.

~ Hene Aku Kwapong, CDD Ghana Fellow, Ecobank Ghana board member, & Founder, NBOSI (https://nbosi.org), Personal website: theblueprint.page.