In our series of viewpoints from African journalists, Ghanaian writer Elizabeth Ohene explains how the continent managed to avoid the financial crisis for so long.
As every reporter knows, there is an African angle to every story.
It either starts here or ends here or gets compounded here.
And since it is impossible these days to avoid all these stories about financial meltdown/credit crunch/housing market collapse, I have no choice but to try to assess what impact these matters have had on this little corner of the global village.
“As for a collapse in the housing market, there is no housing market”
First, the housing market and those sub-prime mortgages that started the problem.
Well, over here, we do not do mortgages, sub-prime, toxic or otherwise. And, in these parts, we talk about building a house and not buying a house.
And the building of a house has been known to take up to 10 years, giving rise to a phenomenon known as the uncompleted house - many examples of which you will see dotted all around the country.
An occasional loan
It goes something like this: You get some money, buy a few bags of cement and you start.
When the foundation has been done, you celebrate, and when by the next year, the block-work reaches the window level, you celebrate with a few friends.
Then, slowly, ever so slowly you add on until one day, you finish, or not as the case might be and your children take it up and finish when you are gone.
If you are building a really posh house and you manage to line up a World Bank official or an oil-company employee to agree to rent it for the next five years, the bank might be persuaded to lend you some money to finish it when you get stuck half way through the roofing stage. The loan is at a commercial rate.
But mortgages really are not part of our housing scene.
Very few people have mortgages of any kind and as for a collapse in the housing market, there is no housing market.
Building is such a traumatic undertaking, very few people actually sell their houses once they have finished building them.
Dream-home projects
All the same, it seems even our peculiar housing situation has been impacted by the global situation.
There is a marked increase in the stock of uncompleted houses. Ghanaians who live abroad lead the house-building industry here.
“What business are you going to undertake that will bring returns to cover a 35% interest on the loan”
Speak to any Ghanaian abroad and he has a project - in other words he is building his dream house.
They do it in much the same way as those who live here. They send a $1,000 (£600) this year, $500 the next and after 18 months of doing two or three jobs, they send $5,000 and progress at the site mirrors the flow of these funds.
Now many of these sites are silent. Many of the project owners have been laid off work and there are not many opportunities for them to do two or three jobs.
An African stimulus
Then there is the credit crunch, well, the credit explosion itself never really got here.
All those years that people in the developed economies were being harassed to take loans, no questions asked, the interest rates here were hovering around 18%.
Today, the bank base rate here is 28%.
It is not exactly that the banks do not want to lend you money, even though it must be said that they are not exactly falling over themselves to try to.
But what business are you going to undertake that will bring returns to cover a 35% interest on the loan
I have followed keenly the measures that the various Western governments have been taking to deal with this crisis and I have been telling myself this is one crisis I wish we had been part of.
I do not know any African country that would not be grateful for a stimulus package.
And I would have been very happy to experience one other manifestation of the financial crisis: Falling retail prices and governments begging you to buy cars at big discounts.
Over here the prices keep rising and they never fall.
When news broke about the Nigerian banks and dodgy loans I knew we had finally made it. It is obvious we are now going into our crisis.
This time around, however, nobody can say we brought it to the world.
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