Buy My vote with Paypal
Yes you read right, I am selling my vote to any political party that can remove my beloved Ghana from Paypal’s blacklist. It is a shame to be tagged as a “fraud country” not to offend my brothers from the otherside, even nigeria is no longer on the black list.
The History of The Blacklist
In the early 2000’s in most west African countries including Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal when the internet cafe was a new phenomenon, many youngsters spent most of their time at the cyber cafe surfing the internet. There was however a worrying trend that began to take wave in most of these internet cafes. The young men found darknet websites that gave them unlimited access to credit and mastercard details of people in Europe and America. They used this details to shop for clothing , gadgets from ecommerce websites like Ebay and Amazon. When shipping of the goods were not allowed directly to Africa the fraudsters would use their family and friends abroad as middle men / passage routes to receive the products and further ship it to them in Ghana and their respective countries. Most of these poor and disadvantaged youth found a gold mine in this trade and they spent almost 24 hours shopping and fishing for credit card details to scam. Others went as far as using the paypal accounts of vulnerable account holders to orchestrate this dubious activity.
Somewhere around 2004 after thousands of legitimate users of Paypal , amazon and ebay complained about unusual purchases and huge sums of money were getting lost in their accounts. These technology giants decided it was time to curb this fraudulent activity of credit card fraud. They simultaneously decided to blacklist so many West African countries from using the platform for their illicit activities. Some of the countries that were blacklisted included Ghana , Nigeria and many other African countries. Over the next decade that followed it was impossible for people resident in Ghana and the other blacklisted to make or receive payments on the PayPal platform. With many online merchants using PayPal, sometimes exclusively, to receive payments for products and services, Ghana’s 24 million people, like many more in other blacklisted countries, were unable to transact business.
Efforts to Get of the Blacklist.
In 2013 many African youth decided to use social media and other mediums to gain the attention of Paypal. I will name two of the notable campaigns whose aim was for paypal to be brought to their respective countries. One of them is the outspoken change maker Samuel Darko. He started an online petition here https://www.change.org/p/rupert-keeley-enable-paypal-in-ghana to make it impossible for people resident in Ghana to make or receive payments on the PayPal platform. His target was 5,000 signatures and was able to get about 2,486 signatures and a lot of social media buzz. The second campaign was started by a Nigerian company called Creativity Kills , founded by Neo Ighodaro and they were also able to gain 597 supporters. These initiatives were very essential proving that the new African is able to take the necessary steps for them to be heard.
These campaigns gained a lot of recognition but paypal was unresponsive for a long while until they finally decided to hear the plea of certain countries. According to Rupert Keeley, the executive in charge of the EMEA region of PayPal, as at Tuesday 17th of June, 2014 users from Nigeria and other countries from sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America were finally given access to be able to use the online payment platform. That meant that PayPal now is been used in 203 countries.
This came as a shock to the Ghanaian technology community since we also petitioned and were blacklisted along with Nigeria but they were given access to the platform but not us. It made a little sense since Nigeria now has the fastest economy in Africa and as well one of Africa biggest country with a population of 173.6 million as of 2013. Ghana on the other have a lesser population of about 25 million.
In my humble opinion the reason paypal ignored us was that we made a lot of noise internally on only our social networks especially our social circles about the petition and as a result the message did not get to the right desk at the Paypal offices. We should have instead made good use of institutions like the Ministry of foreign affairs to intervene on our behalf and as well went further on to get the message out there to the our networks in the Diaspora about the rise of young Ghanaian entrepreneurs who paypal will further enhance their work on a global platform.
This is a quote from Raindolf Owusu.
The T&C
My aim here is not to appeal to paypal directly. My target here is the Government and Opposition parties.
For years we have learn in the class rooms and on the air waves, that Ghanaian politicians are always negotiating bad deals for us, This is an opportunity for them to prove it wrong.
Any Opposition party or leader that can prove that it/he/she is making headway in negotiating to remove Ghana from the blacklist has my vote.
If the current government can get Ghana off the blacklist, Before the Morning of election day 2016, then they have my vote.
