Over the weekend, something rather cinematic happened in East Legon. The Ghanaian business mogul, Mr. Osei Kwame Despite, unveiled his latest addition to Ghana’s luxury landscape — an automobile museum. No, not another car showroom or a flashy garage. A whole museum. A place dedicated to celebrating the aesthetics, engineering, and history of automobiles. In Ghana.
The ceremony? Nothing short of regal. Chaired by Otumfuo Osei Tutu II himself — yes, the Asantehene, in all his royal resplendence. Add to the guest list a political potpourri: General Mosquito (Asiedu Nketia) looking surprisingly like someone who wouldn’t mind a vintage Mustang, Ibrahim Mahama in his usual art-meets-capitalist-cool vibe, and of course, the ever-enigmatic Cheddar (Freedom Jacob Caesar) whose mere presence screams, “I, too, own a Bugatti… or two.”
And yet, while social media bathed in the gloss of Benzes and Bentleys, a deeper conversation stirred underneath the surface.
Do We Really Need This?
Some Ghanaians are side-eyeing the entire affair. “An automobile museum? In this economy?” they ask. When roads in rural districts are more pothole than pavement, when ambulance services struggle for maintenance funding, and when public schools lack desks, a monument to luxury cars feels… somewhat tone-deaf.
Critics argue this is yet another example of Ghanaian elite priorities being wildly out of sync with national development needs. What symbolic value does a museum of foreign-engineered machines offer to a country still grappling with import dependency and a weak manufacturing base? Why not a STEM centre? A vocational training hub? A transport innovation lab?
But… It’s His Money
Then there’s the “but it’s his money” camp. And to be fair, they’re not wrong. Despite is a self-made man. His rise from cassette seller to business magnate is the stuff of Ghanaian legend. If he chooses to immortalise his love for cars in a museum, who are we to police his passion?
Private citizens have always influenced public culture — think of Kwame Nkrumah and his ideological monuments, or even Ibrahim Mahama’s Red Clay Studio. In that light, the Despite Automobile Museum can be seen not merely as vanity but as cultural contribution. A Ghanaian version of Jay Leno’s garage — aspirational, curated, uniquely personal.
Some even see it as a tourism opportunity. “If we can charge dollars to see old colonial forts, why not charge to see Rolls Royces?” one supporter quipped on X (formerly Twitter). And there’s merit to that. Heritage isn’t only in artefacts from 1821; it can also be in the artefacts of aspiration, the dreams of a people on wheels.
The Bigger Picture
This event — like much of what passes as national conversation in Ghana — isn’t really about cars. It’s about the distribution of value in society. What do we celebrate? What do we preserve? Who gets to decide what is “important”? In a country where “education is the key” but “money is the padlock,” the symbolism of a luxury car museum hits a nerve.
So, yes, Despite has every right to build whatever he wants. But Ghanaians also have every right to ask what such projects say about the state of our collective imagination.
Is the Automobile Museum a symbol of ambition? A shrine to consumerism? A call for modern preservation? Or just a rich man flexing with polished chrome?
The truth is probably somewhere in between.
Final Thoughts
In a country where history is often left to rot, where libraries are underfunded and museums are ghost towns, the very idea that a museum could spark national debate is a kind of progress. Even if it’s a museum of Ferraris and Phantoms.
Let’s just hope that while we preserve the past in polished engines, we also invest in the future — in classrooms, clinics, and communities that might one day produce the engineers who build our own dream cars.
For me, I’ll just sip my sobolo and wait for the day someone opens a Public Sanitation Museum. Complete with a VR experience of using a public toilet in Nima during flood season. Now that would be realism.
Dr. Asiamah's Gazette 