After celebrating 53 Years of Independence, What's The Way Forward for Ghana

Both David and Marian have left comments saying that Ghana has not achieved much after 53 years of independence. My thinking is that we have achieved something. We've gone to the polls 6 times without incident. We're within schedule of meeting the millenium development goals. Just the other day when we reflected on how our lives changed in the past decade, we mentioned the rule of law, and press freedom as well. We now have a national insurance scheme.So we have achieved something.

Whether we've achieved as much as we could have is another issue all together. But it's one we can't really comment on without knowing what our goals were in 1957. I'm sure you've all heard the speech by Nkrumah in which he said the African would show the world that we can manage our own affairs. What we don't know is if we had a long term national plan. It doesn't look like we ever went through the exercise of developing a National vision. Nkrumah had his own vision and plans.Whilst he realised some of his plans successive governments did not continue on the same path nor did they focus their attention on advancing the same goals. 

In recent years, we've had such visions as Vision 2020. Any of you can tell me if you know what exactly this vision 20-20 is because I don't know. Neither do many of us who would be

considered the cream of the crop and the next generation of Ghana's leaders. And if even we do not know then how can the nation hold the NDC government accountable to this vision? 

The problem with every party that comes into government having their own vision for the country is that there is lack of focus and continuity. Take the national health insurance scheme instituted by ex President Kuffour's administration. When NDC came into power, there was actually talk of reviewing and scrapping it. Anyway, we probably all know the problems to let me move on discussing my proposed solutions.

1. First, Prez. Mills' government, ought to assemble a team of people who actually run this country and who know intimately what our problems are to come up with a list of our most pressing problems. This should be an all inclusive team of leaders from NPP, NDC, CPP, Independents and all other parties 

2. Once we know what our problems are, the same team can decide which of these problems we can and should tackle within a certain timeline...say 20 years. Our goals for all categories from education to healthcare to agriculture and so on need to be specific, measurable, and time bound. E.g. we want to enroll 50% of all high school students into tertiary institutions by 2020. We want 80% of all Ghanaians to be covered under the national health insurance scheme by 2020. This way, we move away from vague terms like "better" Ghana and "improving healthcare" as we're currently doing.

3. In all likelihood, this will be a big document but the highlights of this national development agenda can be summarized into a 20 paged document which every Ghanaian can read and understand. As this will be a national agenda and not a NDC or NPP manifesto, like we currently have, it can actually be translated into local languages and taught in school so that every Ghanaian comes to understand in simple terms

Why do I think this is the way to go? 

First, it gives us a benchmark against which to assess every government which comes into power and equips us to make them accountable. Ghanaians are always talking about how president Kuffour built roads when he was in power. But how many kilometres of roads was he supposed to build? And why roads? I'm sure it was part of a larger development goal but what was it? We take it for granted that a government should build roads and hospitals and schools but this should not be so. A national agenda will keep us all in the know about the goals so that we can measure when a particular government advances us towards those goals. Right now as things stand, if Kuffour build roads and Mills builds houses, how can we measure which moved us closer to a better Ghana? But if we all know that we're trying to build 20 houses and 20 roads but Kuffour builds 10 roads but no houses and Mills builds 10 houses and no roads, at least we'll know that both took us closer to our target. And we now have 10 roads and 10 houses!

Secondly it gives us a way to judge before we vote. Currently majority of us are not voting based on issues. Even our campaign slogans like Nana diE ye nim to fri tete...and adze pa wo fia oye...what does this mean? Utterly meaningless! But once we know where we want to go, then we can judge and say...maybe Atta Mills is a man of integrity and he's from my hometown but given how he has proposed to accomplished the goals of the national agenda in the NDC manifesto, he may not be the best candidate to lead us forward. At that point it doesn't matter that i've known Nana from tete. If I'm not convinced he can accomplish the goals of the national agenda, i don't vote for him.

Thirdly, whenever the president has town hall meetings, people ask questions like why are you travelling so much or why did you renovate your house (in the case of ex prez kuffour)

But when we have a national development agenda, we can then ask them how the travels and the renovations advanced the national devt agenda. Also, when Mrs. Mills attends the speech and prize giving day at Benso Secondary School in 2019, because everyone including the students have been taught the national agenda, they'll ask her...Mrs. Mills, what is your husband doing to ensure that i'll be one of the 50% who'll go on to tertiary institutions next year? It will equip us all to focus on the issues instead of things like Nana deE, yenim no fri tete!

Ato Kwamena Dadzie disagrees with me. He doesn't think it's a good idea to have a national devt agenda. His proposal is that each govt have their own vision and agenda and then if we see they're not working, we vote them out. Or if NDC institutes health insurance and NDC comes and scraps it, then during the next elections, we vote NDC out again.This is what we're doing now and it's not working because that method prevents us from focussing and combining our efforts to solve the most pertinent problems and we also lose time when govts don't continue with good initiatives from past govts. My question to Ato is, what exactly is your argument against having a National agenda?

To everybody else, do you agree or disagree with me. Do you have anything to add? A correction to make? An idea that will move us forward? If so, please share.

Credits: Mad love to K.K.Yankson for allowing me to drink from his fountain of knowledge:)