Vice President Dr. Bawumia
VICE President Alhaji Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has pleaded with Ghanaians to be patient with the government as it tries to remove things he considered impediments that have become bottlenecks to effective economic management of the country.
Dr Bawumia said the agenda of the Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party’s government was to transform and modernise the Ghanaian economy to fit into the global scheme of things.
After 60 years of independence, Dr Bawumia said, the country was yet to fix some basic things to pave way for the efficiency and effectiveness of the country’s governance structure to spur growth.
Addressing the UK-Ghana Investment Summit 2018 in Accra yesterday, Dr Bawumia said it was unacceptable to be living in the past when the world was moving rapidly with technology.
The summit on the topic “the Investment Case for Ghana,” brought together state actors and the private sector to explore the investment opportunities in the various sectors of the country.
According to Vice President Bawumia, the current government was met with a daunting challenge of digitising the country; a challenge he said progress was being made 20 months on into the government’s four-year mandate.
Some of the impediments in the way of the government when it won political power was to create a national identity system which would in effect be the springboard for enhancing service delivery at the agencies, he said.
So far, he said significant progress had been made in transforming the drivers licensing regime, passport application systems, land and business registrations.
He also mentioned the mobile interoperability, the digital addressing system, paperless port, improvement in rural telephony as some of the modernisation and digitisation drive the government was making significant progress in.
“These were the challenges we thought that after 60 years of independence, we should try and address alongside the whole process of transformation because transformation and modernisation would be beneficial to the everyday Ghanaian” Dr Bawumia told the gathering.
“We have to be patient to get these things to be done and once they are done, we will begin to, through the network externalities, see how all these things fit together for the good of this country.
“The modernisation and transformation we are doing is to support this vision of a Ghana Beyond Aid because the world now is about data,” he added.
He said by formalising and digitising the economy, efficient services would be effectively and efficiently delivered “but we will keep improving the system as we move along.”
Dr Bawumia noted that the importance of data to effective economic management could not be underestimated which is the reason the government was embarking on the drive to have a digitised economy where data would readily be available for planning.
“If you have data, you can manage your economy in a way to generate so much income, so much efficiency, so much productivity that oil in the ground may not be able to do for you and this is the Ghana that we are trying to build,” he emphasised.
BY JULIUS YAO PETETSI
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