Ghana has quite a story to tell. It was the first country south of the Sahara to wean itself off colonial rule. With power to govern now firmly rested in her own hands, Ghana’s different leaders will over time set her destiny on many different paths, with the Ghanaian people also contributing to what will become a chequered history of bright and blight.
The Ghana story of six decades can therefore not be left at the doorstep of her leaders alone.
If there is blame or praise to be shared – and there is – then the people too must feature prominently for their due. It summarises altogether in a somewhat beautiful but murky image of a tossed dice taking forever to come down, leaving a fraction of the people looking up in expectation while the rest stir in the opposite direction hopeful that the dice will soon fall.
But it is not to blame or praise time. Having only seen for myself the second part of that story, but yet heard it told in full, I consider it a moment to pause for deep thought.
We must confront ourselves with hard and direct questions on our stagnating economic performance, our attitude towards social policy, our democratic trajectory and not the least our collective attitudes.
The question of how a country that started life with a stable and highly promising economy; a world leader of cocoa, endowed also with some of the richest minerals of this earth and equipped with impressive infrastructure, should come to have a debt stock of about 73 percent of its GDP, needs to engage our thoughts at 60.
We must stretch those thoughts, and ask ourselves why and how countries like Singapore and Malaysia for instance, will come to be successful without us. It is a sad comparison to make, but it is good for us if it will propel us to shape our onward march right.
When in 1957, we were happily taking power from our colonial masters and being handed with such wealth to command our own affairs, somewhere across the ocean Malaysia and Singapore too were going through a similar exercise.
But it was only similar to the extent of the act of independence, because whilst we were happy to become masters of our own wealth, theirs was a different story.
Singapore by the time of its independence did not have much to its name. Independence came for them with a price whereas it came for us with pride. Theirs was a very small domestic market. Unemployment levels were very high. Poverty rate was disturbing and 70 percent of its households lived in badly overcrowded conditions – a third of its people squatted in slums.
But whilst we embarked on a massive industrialisation agenda that was largely reckless and mostly misplaced, they, on the flip side rolled out a well thought out and carefully tailored investment drive that would make Singapore an attractive destination for foreign investment.
The success of that story was almost inevitable and by 2001 foreign companies accounted for 75 percent of its manufactured output and 85 percent of manufactured exports.
In one single generation, it was able to move from a tiny third-world country into a first-world state, and the story is all too known to all of us by now.
Back here in Ghana, we were happily doing so much that meant so little. We built a mango processing plant (at 80 percent of the original budget) only to discover belatedly that we did not have such mango trees growing in the wild to feed the plant. Another seven or so years were needed for the plant to take off properly.
We built a sugar plant without a water system and the plant would be rendered redundant for another year. The implications of investing so much money, some of which was borrowed, in factories that will become idle for one reason or another, cannot be overstated.
There was also an element of poor political decision-making embedded in an already misplaced agenda. We set up shoe production factories that were located nowhere near areas with available leather supply.
The finished product too was so poor the Ghanaian people simply could not patronise them, and even an attempt to force our police service to purchase them was opposed with equal force. We have succeeded in turning the saying on its head: to whom much was given, much was wasted.
It crystallises into a question of quality of leadership, held together by detailed questions of vision and priorities. Sixty years on, what have we got to display for the most basic necessities of education and healthcare?
Our expenditure on education has averaged about 5.5 percent for two decades running and even though this is not in itself bad, we spend nearly 70 percent of that money on salaries and wages.
What is left for building and improving the infrastructure as well as improving the quality of training is as sad as the quality of academic transcripts we produce.
If this was not enough, we cut down on school enrollment to answer the question of infrastructure deficit. That is not what 60 year olds do.
We must be innovative and aggressive in our handling of our educational sector. Education provides the only enduring material for building the much-needed bridge between the rich and poor, and I have argued before that making that material expensive and inaccessible is the one sure way of widening further the gap.
Nelson Mandela is right in saying that “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
But changing the world around us is how we contribute to changing the world as a whole, and President Akufo-Addo’s insatiable hunger to see a total and progressive transformation of Ghana’s educational sector, which will culminate into free quality education for all, is to be commended and supported.
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