The following is an opinion piece by Dr. Reginald Arthur, Lecturer and Director of Graduate and Executive Education at the Faculty of Business Administration and Communication Arts, Academic City University, Accra.
The recent wave of anti-foreigner sentiment in South Africa has sparked outrage across Ghana and the continent, and rightly so. No form of xenophobia, intimidation, or violence against foreign nationals can be justified. But Dr. Reginald Arthur, a business academic at Academic City University, argues that Ghana cannot afford to process the crisis purely through an emotional lens. There is, he contends, a deeper and more uncomfortable economic conversation the country must urgently have with itself.
At the centre of his analysis is a question raised by a viral confrontation between a South African woman and a Ghanaian trader in which she asked why citizens of one of Africa’s top gold producers were in South Africa doing nails and hair business rather than building enterprises at home. Dr. Arthur does not endorse the tone. But he says the underlying question cannot simply be dismissed.
“Why do many Ghanaian businesses remain small, informal and unable to scale into globally competitive enterprises?” he asks, arguing that this structural reality makes Ghanaian workers vulnerable in ways that mere diplomatic responses will not fix.
His analysis identifies five core constraints holding Ghanaian businesses back. The cost of doing business is prohibitively high, with entrepreneurs often required to pay several years of rent advance before opening modest trading spaces. Access to credit remains deeply limited, with banks demanding collateral, audited accounts, and documentation that most small businesses cannot produce, and where loans are available, interest rates crush fragile cash flows before businesses mature.
Weak governance and management systems mean that many enterprises remain personality-driven survival ventures rather than scalable companies. A limited culture of strategic partnerships and digital integration further compounds the problem. And an ownership mindset that prioritises 100 percent control of a struggling micro-business over a minority stake in a fast-growing enterprise continues to limit ambition and scale.
Beyond economics, Dr. Arthur points to what he calls a “flight mentality” embedded in Ghanaian culture, the social glorification of migration as a marker of success, which he argues drains entrepreneurial talent and weakens confidence in building sustainable opportunities at home.
His prescription is structural rather than motivational. He calls for reform of commercial rent systems to make start-up costs manageable, alternative credit assessment frameworks that recognise mobile money records and transaction histories rather than collateral, national programmes to build management and governance capacity, and deliberate policy support for Ghanaian businesses seeking to expand across Africa.
“The real aspiration should not merely be to celebrate wealthy individuals,” Dr. Arthur writes. “The bigger ambition should be producing Ghanaian-owned firms that become the next MTN, Shoprite, UBA, Zenith Bank or DSTV.”
His conclusion is pointed: Ghana’s long-term dignity and influence on the continent will be determined not by its natural resources alone, but by its ability to produce businesses powerful enough to shape markets beyond its borders.
