The Perils of ‘Anyhowism’ in National Development

By Hene Aku Kwapong

There is a fatal misconception at the heart of Ghana’s development discourse: the belief that informality is merely an economic problem — a matter of untaxed vendors, unregistered businesses, and shadow markets. In reality, informality is a cultural contagion, and its most dangerous vector is not the street hawker, but the state itself.

Let me frame what I am about to describe with a simple model. Not because reality is simple, but because a simple model, honestly stated, tells you more than a thousand pages of lament about a “national character” that has emerged as a cultural contagion.

The Coordination Game of Societal Behavior

Here is the model. Imagine a society where everyone is trying to guess how everyone else will behave, and then acting accordingly. Economists call this a coordination game. The important thing about coordination games is that they often have more than one stable outcome, more than one equilibrium, and which one you end up in depends less on deep cultural traits than on what people expect, right now, of the people at the top.

If citizens expect the powerful to follow the rules, they follow the rules too, because doing otherwise gets you punished or shamed. If citizens expect the powerful to ignore the rules, following the rules yourself becomes a “mug’s game.” You are the only one stopped at the red light while the armored van blows through it. So you stop bothering. Not because you lack discipline, but because you are behaving perfectly rationally given what you have observed.

The High Cost of a Low-Trust Equilibrium

This is, in essence, is what the author calls “anyhowism” in Ghana, and it deserves to be taken seriously because it represents our current low-trust equilibrium. It is expensive in exactly the way bad monetary policy or bad tax policy are expensive: they raise the cost of doing ordinary things, they discourage investment, and they fall hardest on people with the least power to protect themselves.

Development is not merely a function of fiscal policy, infrastructure spending, or resource extraction. At its core, development is the product of uniform standards — shared, non-negotiable expectations that govern how power is exercised, how public space is treated, and how citizens interact with one another. When those standards are upheld, trust flourishes, transaction costs fall, and capital forms. When they are broken—deliberately and visibly — by the very people who wrote the rules, the nation descends into a corrosive mindset that Ghanaians vividly call “anyhowism”: the casual, unapologetic belief that doing things any which way is perfectly acceptable.

State-Sponsored Impunity and Civic Decay

This mindset is not indigenous to the street. It is imported daily from the State House, Parliament, and the security barracks. It is taught through a thousand small performances of impunity. And it manifests in a predictable catalogue of civic decay that threatens the orderly emergence of Ghana’s social organization.