09/11/2023
This is to let you know that on November 2nd, I finally clicked on the "Confirm and Publish" button. "Such were the Conditions: The Kahnplay Incident" is now available on Lulu Bookstores (see link below). I worked on the manuscript from February to July earlier this year. I have spent the time since then editing it and preparing it for publication. I would like to give special thanks to Ian Yhap, Dan Ofori, Jerome Dendura, Martei Markwei, Corina Certain, Michael Schneider, Michael Creighton, Fui Gbedemah, Alexis Aning, Ernesto Taricone, and Charlene Zehnder among a host of others for their helpful comments and suggestions on the manuscript.
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Such were the Conditions: The Kahnplay Incident is a richly packed memoir, motivated by Africa’s poverty conundrum. It offers ground-level, front-row views of African development, as it navigates through, around, and over obstacles—harrowing, overwhelming, and heart wrenching—faced by a young Ghanaian determined to fulfil the promise of independence in the aftermath of truncated development: through war, coups, geopolitics, corruption, and misguided donor conditionalities.
This fast-paced, elucidative book captivates the reader as it tells of the tragic loss of life during Liberia’s coup, the isolation in Kahnplay’s dungeons, a death sentence meted out by a military tribunal, desperate days of homelessness in the US, the schizophrenic world that bribery and extortion impose upon business negotiations in Ghana, and the high risks for private development in Charles Taylor’s Liberia.
Ronald Quist, born two years before Ghana gained its independence, has spent a life-time trying to reconcile his childhood ambition to make his “nation great and strong" with a lived experience of underdevelopment through a physics education at the University of Ghana and Queen’s University in Canada, a diverse career in Power Planning in Liberia, Utility Analysis in the US, Software Development and Training in the US, Germany, Ghana, and Nigeria, Project Financing in the US and Ghana, and Public
Finance Management work for the IMF, World Bank, European Commission, USAID, DFID, AfDB, and CIDA in over 30 countries including: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Botswana, Eritrea, Kenya, Kuwait, Malawi, Namibia, Nepal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Vietnam,Yemen, and Zambia.
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