By Lord Fiifi Quayle 26|12|2025

Ghana does not suffer from a shortage of intelligence, ambition, or effort. Every year, we produce tens of thousands of educated, skilled, and motivated young people. Yet we continue to describe their collective condition with a single, damning word: unemployment.

I have come to believe that this word obscures more than it explains.

What we call youth unemployment in Ghana is, in many cases, not a failure of work ethic or education. It is a failure of capital formation.

We train citizens extensively and then release them into markets empty-handed. When they struggle, we diagnose the problem as a skills gap, a mindset issue, or a lack of discipline. Rarely do we ask the more uncomfortable question: what if the problem is that we expect productivity without ownership?

This essay advances a simple but demanding argument:
a modern state that educates its citizens but does not capitalise them has only done half its job.

The Limits of the Jobs Narrative

For decades, public policy in Ghana and across much of Africa, has been dominated by the language of jobs. Governments promise jobs. Youth demand jobs. Political success is measured by job creation numbers.

Yet this framework quietly assumes something dangerous: that jobs are the natural end point of development rather than one of its possible outcomes.

Jobs are downstream phenomena. They emerge where capital exists, where enterprises are formed, where risk is absorbed, and where ownership structures are already in place. When we focus exclusively on jobs, we ignore the upstream conditions that make them possible.

The uncomfortable truth is that many young Ghanaians are not unemployed because they are unproductive. They are unemployed because they are undercapitalised.

Education Without Capital Is an Incomplete Project

We rightly take pride in expanding access to education. But education alone does not confer economic agency. A trained carpenter without tools is not an entrepreneur; a coder without startup capital is not a tech founder; a graduate without assets is not automatically a participant in the economy.

Education builds capacity. Capital activates it.

When a society separates these two: sometimes by decades, it creates frustration, dependency, and wasted potential. We have normalised a system where citizens are expected to wait, queue, or petition for opportunities rather than create them.

This is not a moral failure on the part of the youth. It is a structural failure in how we think about citizenship.

Capital as Public Infrastructure

We understand intuitively that roads enable commerce and electricity enables industry. We accept that these are public goods worth collective investment. Yet we hesitate when the same logic is applied to citizen capital.

I argue that capital: when structured, conditional, and productive, is also public infrastructure.

This does not mean handouts. It does not mean consumption grants. It means early, disciplined, rules-based capital formation that is earned through responsibility and unlocked for productive use.

A state that invests in citizen capital is not distorting the market; it is completing it.

From Welfare to Social Capitalism

The model I propose is not socialism and not laissez-faire capitalism. It is social capitalism, a system in which the state acts as an early enabler of ownership, while markets remain the final arbiters of success.

Under this framework:
• The state helps citizens accumulate capital early
• Access is conditional on skills, ethics, and accountability
• Markets reward discipline and productivity
• Failure is possible, but dependency is not institutionalised

This approach respects individual agency while acknowledging structural realities. It replaces paternalism with partnership.

Capitalising Citizenship from Birth

The logical conclusion of this thinking is straightforward: capital formation must begin early.

If every Ghanaian child begins life with a protected, long-term capital account, built gradually through public, private, family, and diaspora contributions; then citizenship itself becomes a pathway to ownership.

By the time that child reaches adulthood, they do not arrive at the economy as a supplicant, but as a participant.

This is not about making everyone wealthy. It is about making everyone economically equipped.

Why This Matters for Ghana Specifically

Ghana has an entrepreneurial culture, a young population, and increasing technological reach. What we lack is a systematic way to translate these advantages into durable, intergenerational economic power.

We cannot continue to rely on informal hustling as a substitute for structured capital access. Nor can we expect the private sector alone to shoulder the early risks of citizen formation.

A nation that aspires to stability, dignity, and shared prosperity must take responsibility for how its citizens enter economic life.

A Non-Partisan National Project

This idea is not owned by any political party, and it should never be. It is larger than electoral cycles and stronger than ministerial portfolios.

Capitalising citizens is a constitutional-level concern, not a campaign promise. It must be designed to outlive governments, resist political capture, and operate transparently.

If implemented well, it would quietly change everything: how young people plan their lives, how families think about education, how communities organise production, and how politics relates to opportunity.

A Closing Reflection

Every generation inherits a question it must answer.

For ours, I believe the question is this:
will citizenship in Ghana remain a passive status, or will it become an active economic foundation?

We have spent decades expanding access to education. The next step, more difficult, more consequential, is to expand access to capital.

Not recklessly. Not sentimentally. But deliberately, responsibly, and fairly.

That is the case for social capital.
That is the case for capitalising citizenship.

Lord Fiifi Quayle
Public Intellectual & Political Economist
Architect of the Quayle Social Capital Framework