Quicken the pace, Mr President

By Rev. Dr Anyani-Boadum

During the past eight months, while the 2012 election petition dragged on at the Supreme Court, Ghana, undoubtedly, experienced significant deterioration in its economy. Considering our current economic situation, I dare say that these are not normal times. The period calls for all hands to be put to the plough, hence, to quote President John Mahama, "we cannot afford to be cynical. We do not have the luxury of sitting on the side lines. We must all work to make Ghana work."  

To this, I say to President Mahama and his team; it is now time to go to work. Need I remind the President that good intentions alone cannot build a nation, and the outcome of election 2016 shall be determined by the achievement of the NDC government and not by party slogans and propaganda.

Play like a winning team

In our quest for peace in the country, the Supreme Court handed the nation an important side benefit: It made certain the restoration of decorum and responsiveness into our political discussions. With the affirmation of the validity of President Mahama’s election, the expectations of Ghanaians,- as part of the role of leadership- is for the NDC as the party in power to play the game like a winning team that has the desire and attitude to protect the scoreline until the final whistle.

In our local football dramas, teams trailing in a match sometimes, instead of maintaining discipline in order to maximise their potential to level up, throw caution to the wind and show their frustration by losing their discipline. They heckle their opponents ceaselessly and carelessly as they engage in rough tackles, in clear violations of the rules and spirit of the game.    

The feeling is that they dare risk hurting their opponents to frustrate them to commit offences that may attract red cards. As the party in power, the NDC has a critical obligation to work assiduously to preserve the decorum and to promote the peace through fairness and transparency in the national body politic.  

It is not uncommon to see a team with a comfortable lead in a game squander the opportunity by losing the match through tactical indiscipline. This happens when the players of the winning team get distracted, lose their focus, drop their composure, discard discipline or resort to unnecessary rough play.  

Mr President, need I remind you that the game is won on the field of play; not on the populist “turf” as is being encouraged by our political activists and political commentators in media houses.

Come 2016, the consideration of voters will be focused on the strength of your competence and the tangible outcomes of your four-year reign. Very little, if anything, will be delivered by squabbles and noise making on the radio; therefore, control the pack: insist that your ministers and other appointees focus on their assignments and work hard on the nation’s problems.

The pace must quicken and the muscles of the innovative solutions being offered to address emerging challenges must be tougher for an optimum environment to be provided for the mass of our people to build local industries and have control over our resources.

Building local industries

In spite of the age of globalisation and open markets, nations continue to protect and grow their local industries as the best bet; the safest and most tangible way to grow a national economy.  Government must, therefore, take a more formidable stance to deliberately create the space and optimum environment for our local industries to develop as the foci for foreign participation in our industrialisation, rather than for the foreign companies to continue to dump their goods on us.

Local entrepreneurship and industries should be empowered with more robust research to fulfill their purpose and maximise potential as a means to consolidate the nation’s status as a middle income country. It is awkward, in fact baffling, talking about research in this day and age, to note that there is no research project to even try to build simple combustion engine to motorise simple operations and to produce tools and simple, ordinary products such as sprayers, weed-whackers, generators, vulcanising machines, motorbikes or tricycles for garbage collection in the country.

Small beginnings for industrialisation

Talking about building the local industry, there is a multi-trillion dollar wellness and beauty industry worldwide that offers tremendous promise towards job creation and massive foreign exchange earnings. A visit to any beauty supply shop in the United States, for example, will reveal how much the economy of every region in this country stands to gain from that industry.

Apart from the traditional products such as shea-butter, cocoa butter and oil palm extracts, there are unimaginable non-traditional products- present across all 10 regions of the country — including mangoes, lime, lemon, avocadoes, oils from several plants to serve as raw materials for all kinds of hair and skin products. The nation can, within a short time, realise enormous benefit, should the government set its mind to the task to promote local industries to take advantage of the huge market available across the globe.

Democratic governance is about promoting the well-being of the masses. If our forebears and founders believed that benefit could be gained from a proper understanding and use of democracy and democratic practices, should we not also expect to find such benefit in our current living circumstances and for our posterity? Please quicken the pace.

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