ghananlpcommunity/ghana-gov-speeches-sentences huggingface dataset:
This endeavor is essential, as the strength of our democracy, the integrity of our constitutional order, and the rule of law require continuous renewal.
We must not allow weaknesses in our governance framework to fester until they threaten national stability.
Instead, we must take proactive steps to reinforce the very foundation of our democracy.
I urge all Ghanaians to participate in this process by submitting their recommendations to the committee.
This is an opportunity to ensure that our constitutional framework truly reflects the collective aspirations of the Ghanaian people and serves as a robust instrument for national progress.
Fellow Ghanaians, Dr.
Kwame Nkrumah understood the essence of unity—not only in Ghana but on the entire African continent, when he said, "The forces that unite us are inherent and far greater than the divisions imposed upon us."
In the spirit of unity and brotherhood that independence represents, I wish to speak directly to you, my brothers and sisters in Bawku and everywhere else in our land where conflict rages.
I do not speak as president but as your son and brother, in whose hands you have entrusted a solemn duty.
It is time for lasting peace.
Our children deserve to inherit a land where dreams are nurtured, not nightmares relived, where markets bustle with trade, not tension, and where schools echo in learning, not melancholy.
Let us not be swayed by division, mistrust, or the weight of past injuries.
Let us give renewal of friendship a chance.
This is not an invitation to simply forget the past—far from it.
It is an invitation to live above it.
My brothers and sisters, this is our moment in history.
We have endured trials, faced challenges, and carried the burdens of our struggles, but never have we given up.
Through every storm and shadow, we have kept the flame of hope alive.
And now, at this critical juncture, we must rise with courage, determination, and the unwavering belief that a brighter future is within our grasp.
Let us reflect on the great movements that have transformed the world, the movements that liberated us from the bonds of colonialism and the voices that shaped our path to democratic rule.
It was ordinary people—workers, dreamers, farmers, students, the young and the old—who refused to accept the way things were.
They marched, spoke out, struggled, and they prevailed.
From Africa’s liberation movements to the fight for civil rights, from the pursuit of democracy to the battle against poverty and inequality, one lesson stands clear.
When people unite with a common purpose, nothing can stand in their way.
As I said before parliament, we shall live the dreams of our forebears in our lifetime.
This is not just a promise; it is a call to action.
Let this be our mission: to rise above fear, to silence the voices of doubt, and to harness the strength within us to create a future that is fair, prosperous, and inclusive.
Let us move forward together, side by side, knowing that every sacrifice we make today will prepare the way for future generations.
Thank you very much, and I wish you a happy Independence Day.
Chairman, Minister for Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs, Ministers of State Present, Members of Parliament Present, Our esteemed Niimei and Naamei, Our revered Religious Leaders, Representatives of our Development Partners, Chairperson of Coalition of NGOs in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, President of Environmental Services Providers Association, Cherished Media Personalities gathered here, My beloved Students from Accra School of Hygiene and other second cycle schools invited, Distinguished Invited Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, Environmental sanitation is fundamental to public health, the health of the citizenry, education, and tourism and is one of the key drivers of sustainable socio-economic development of every country.
Yet, despite our progress in environmental sanitation service delivery, challenges persist.
Unsanitary conditions contribute to the spread of diseases, environmental degradation, and hinder our progress as people.
It is, therefore, incumbent upon us to prioritize and address these issues with untiring resolve with a coordinated, sustained and collective effort to confront these challenges head-on to keep our cities and towns clean.
It is in recognition of this need that my government, through the Ministry of Local Government, Chieftaincy, and Religious Affairs, is re-introducing the National Sanitation Day as part of the “Clean Up Ghana” agenda.
This initiative aims to foster a culture of environmental responsibility, improve public health and enhance the aesthetic beauty of our cities and communities.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is with great pleasure and a deep sense of responsibility that I join you to officially launch the re-introduction of the National Sanitation Day.
The National Sanitation Day is a call to action; an opportunity for each of us, regardless of our political affiliation, social standing, ethnicity, or religious beliefs, to unite in keeping our surroundings clean.
The day signifies the importance of community ownership and collective responsibility in maintaining a healthy environment.
This initiative will be driven by partnerships across government institutions, traditional authorities, religious bodies, community organizations, businesses, educational institutions, and the public.
Chairperson, the success of the previous National Sanitation Day which took place between 2014 and 2016 demonstrated the immense potential of citizen-led efforts, as communities actively desilted gutters, cleared waste, and engaged in proper environmental sanitation practices.
The re-introduced National Sanitation Day will be observed nationwide on the first Saturday of every month.
I urge all Ghanaians to come out in their numbers to help clean our surroundings, desilt the gutters and weed unkempt public spaces.
Let us make this a nationwide habit that reflects our identity as environmentally conscious people.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is our expectation that the National Sanitation Day will help us achieve the following objectives: Promote awareness, create a sense of ownership, participation and shared responsibility among citizens, encouraging community-led efforts.
Establish and sustain a culture of routine cleaning and maintenance of our surroundings.
Enhance the aesthetic beauty and pleasant environment in our cities and towns, promoting national pride, identity and responsible behaviour.
Improve environmental sanitation, and related hygiene practices to reduce disease outbreaks by breaking the cycle of disease transmission through effective waste management.
Supporting economic development through tourism as a clean country can boost tourism and attract the needed investors.
I am fully convinced that the National Sanitation Day will in no small way contribute to the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those that prioritize health and wellbeing, sustainable cities, clean water and sanitation, climate action, and ocean and land conservation.
We need to be committed to building a cleaner, safer, and more resilient Ghana for present and future generations.
Chairperson, the "Resetting Ghana" agenda, is committed to ensuring that every Ghanaian has access to improved sanitation facilities, for which we are investing in modern waste management systems and sanitation facilities across the length and breadth of the country.
The sanitation sector provides a viable avenue for employment and economic empowerment.
I encourage our teeming young Ghanaians to take an active interest in developing entrepreneurship innovations around the current challenges of waste management facing our country.
It is my hope that through creation of enabling environment, our youth will take advantage to transform waste management sector into viable economic venture, to invariably create employment and sustain the environment.
Ladies and Gentlemen, as government we are committed to protecting the environment, through initiatives like Blue Water River Guards and the Tree for Life Restoration.
Under Blue Water programme, 2,000 youth are expected to be trained to combat illegal mining and protect Ghana’s river bodies, with an initial phase engaging 400 participants.
The Tree for Life Restoration initiative promotes afforestation and environmental sustainability by restoring degraded forests and fighting climate change.
It engages youth in reforestation efforts, planting economically valuable species like cocoa, palm, timber and rubber, thereby creating sustainable employment and supporting ecological balance.
I want to assure Ghanaians that my government will implement a new performance assessment framework for Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives.
This framework will incorporate stringent environmental sanitation indicators to ensure that the Chief Executives prioritise and invest in environmental sanitation services within their areas of jurisdiction as pledged in our manifesto.
Distinguished Invited Guests, I wish to emphasize the critical role of stakeholders in making the National Sanitation Day a success, by actively participating.
We are not just cleaning our environment; we are securing the health of our people, protecting our environment and leaving a legacy for the generations to come.
To our cherished media friends, your power to inform, educate and influence public behaviour cannot be overstated.
We therefore entreat you to use your various platforms to raise awareness, sensitize the public and promote responsible environmental practices.
Your collaboration is key to ensuring that every Ghanaian understands the significance of this day for their active participation.
Our Revered Traditional and Religious Leaders , as custodians and embodiments of our culture and religious beliefs, I appeal to you to use your influence to encourage your followers to embrace and support this laudable initiative.
Your voice can inspire change, foster a sense of ownership, and strengthen community bonds for a cleaner and healthier Ghana.
As part of our comprehensive agenda to improve the quality of life of our citizens.
I am committed to strengthening the relevant institutions to deliver effective and efficient environmental sanitation services at the local government level.
Subsequently, as promised under my party’s manifesto, we will upgrade the Environmental Health and Sanitation Units at the Regional, Metropolitan, Municipal, District levels to fully fledged departments.
These departments will receive all the necessary resources to deliver sustainable environmental sanitation services throughout our regions and districts.
To ensure the long-term sustainability of the National Sanitation Day, the “Cleanest City Award”, an incentive-based approach that recognizes districts, municipalities, and metropolitan assemblies for their dedication to maintaining a clean environment will be instituted to foster healthy competition and reinforce the culture of environmental cleanliness in the country.
My Fellow Citizens, the success of the National Sanitation Day rests on the collective efforts of all of us.
Let us rekindle the spirit of communal labour, take responsibility for our environment, and ensure that our surroundings reflect the pride we hold so dearly.
I entreat all Ghanaians to take ownership of this initiative.
Let us make the National Sanitation Day a true celebration of our commitment to a cleaner, healthier and more sustainable Ghana.
Together, we can build a nation that future generations will be proud of; a nation where cleanliness and environmental responsibility will be part of our everyday life.
On this note, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen , it is my pleasure to declare National Sanitation Day duly launched.
Thank you, and may God bless our homeland, Ghana
Excellencies, Heads of State and Government, Distinguished Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Truth begins with language, with the power that words hold to shape consciousness, to shift perspective, to propel action.
I therefore offer this truth as a starting point: There is no such thing as a slave.
There were human beings who were trafficked and then enslaved by people who believed they could own those human beings as chattel, as their personal property.
Some will hear this and think that I am splitting hairs.
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
they might ask.
It’s not at all the same thing.
Not if you acknowledge an individual’s humanity.
Not if you respect an individual’s basic right to dignity.
The entire transatlantic slave trade was designed to deny African people their humanity.
And that denial was premised on a racial hierarchy with no basis in fact or science, a racial hierarchy that deemed whiteness superior and blackness inferior.
The atrocities that were committed against enslaved Africans, the myriads of injustices that were borne of slavery and carried forward into successive social frameworks, took place specifically because they were considered objects.
So, when discussing slavery and its resulting institutions and practices, we must always start by reclaiming racial equality, the dignity of Africans, the humanity of our ancestors who were enslaved and, as a matter of course, our own humanity.
Recently, someone asked me to explain the importance of the resolution on the declaration of the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity.
I responded without pause or hesitation, and I’d like to share with you what I told him.
This resolution allows us, as a global community, to collectively bear witness to the plight of the 18 million men, women, and children whose homes, communities, names, families, hopes, dreams, futures, and lives were stolen from them over the course of four centuries.
I speak these words today not only for Ghana, but also in solidarity with the rest of Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, the wider Diaspora and, indeed, all people of good conscience throughout the world.
This resolution is a pathway to healing and reparative justice.
This resolution is a safeguard against forgetting.
Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, violence begins with language; when words are used as weapons, or to codify abuse; when people are called out of their names.
Regardless of their state of dress when they were captured, enslaved Africans were always stripped of their clothing while being kept in the dungeons of the fortresses that had been built by the Europeans.
They were forced, with their limbs chained and shackled, onto the cargo hold of a ship.
They remained naked, packed like sardines, during the months-long journey through the Middle Passage.
Not all those who were loaded onto the ships survived the voyage.
A number of the ships sank, and many of the enslaved jumped overboard, choosing certain death to captivity.
10 to 15% of enslaved people died in the Middle Passage.
Whenever a ship did arrive at its destination, the enslaved people, still naked, were taken to the market, where they were inspected and appraised, like livestock.
They were then placed on an auction block in front of an audience of potential buyers and sold to the highest bidder.
Once they were on the plantation where they would work and live, they were stripped of their names.
No longer Fatou, Bubakar, Kofi, Nana Yaw, Emeka, Nahnyong or Hamisu, they were given names like Ben, Jemima, Toby, or Mary.
In addition to their new name, they were also called “girl,” or “boy,” regardless of how old they were; and there was also—or maybe I should say always— that filthy N-word.
If a surname was ever needed, it would be that of their master.
Sometimes they were even branded, like cattle, with the plantation's insignia or logo.
There were sugar plantations, but there were also coffee, cotton, tobacco, and cocoa plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas.
South America had diamond and gold mines as well.
The production of indigo also took place in Jamaica.
The people who were enslaved laboured on those plantations from sunrise to sunset.
The conditions under which they worked were brutal.
They were beaten, occasionally to the point of death.
They were underfed, kept in cramped quarters, and they often died young, if not from the labour then from diseases.
Though some enslaved women were turned into breeders, in many of these places, the deaths far outnumbered the births.
Let’s not mince words, ladies and gentlemen.
Business was booming because when labour is virtually free, profit margins are huge.
African lives were disposable.
If too many of the enslaved died, more were captured from their homes on the continent, enslaved and trafficked.
During conversations about slavery, this is the point at which euphemisms are introduced, and there’s a rush to talk about abolition.
But we can’t afford to look away; this is precisely the part when we should pay close attention because the devil is in the details.
I’m going to share four trafficking destinations with you.
Remember when you hear these numbers that this is not data; these are human beings.
Roughly six million enslaved Africans were trafficked to Brazil, which is the fifth largest nation in the world, stretching 4,400 kilometres from north to south and 4,320 kilometres from east to west.
Almost 2 million enslaved Africans were trafficked to Jamaica, which was the most profitable of all the sugar-producing locations.
The island is 235 kilometres long and between 34 and 84 kilometres wide, depending on where you’re located.
About 500,000 enslaved Africans were trafficked to America.
From the early 17th century, when the first ship arrived, to the mid-19th century, when chattel slavery was abolished, America grew from 3 colonies to an independent nation with 36 states.
Over 450,000 enslaved Africans were trafficked to Barbados, an island that is 34 kilometres long and 23 kilometres wide.
Before the trafficking of enslaved Africans, plantation labour in Barbados came from white indentured servants, who were usually Irish.
There were two major problems with indentured servants: one was that they eventually had to be granted their freedom, and the other was that if they ran away, catching them proved challenging because they were white and could easily blend in.
In 1661, Barbados enacted a code for the enslaved.
In the preamble, negroes are described as “a heathenish, brutish and uncertain, dangerous kind of people.”
It goes on to explain that this is why there must be a set of laws detailing how they should be punished.
Clause Two of the law details what to do if “any negro man or woman shall offer any violence to any Christian as by striking or the like.”
It goes on to say that if it is a first offence, the negro should be severely whipped by the Constable.
However, if it’s the negro’s second offence, “he shall be severely whipped, his nose slit and be burned in the face.”
This code gave owners and overseers the ability to torture, maim and even kill enslaved Africans with impunity.
And it became something of a template for the rest of the Anglo-Atlantic world.
In 1662, a year after Barbados enacted its code, a legal doctrine was established to set judicial precedent in the American colony of Virginia.
It was titled partus sequitur ventrum, which translates from the Latin as “What is born follows the womb.”
This legal framework ensured that all children born of enslaved women would also automatically be enslaved, regardless of who the father was.
And it is important to note that many enslaved women were impregnated because they were raped by the plantation owners or overseers.
But what this law did, even in the cases where a baby was not the product of rape, was strip the child of its paternity.
In the eyes of the law, that child, as an enslaved person, was property that could be given or sold at its owner’s whim.
The doctrine was adopted throughout the Americas, including in Brazil.
People will sometimes try to put a disclaimer on slavery by insisting that you can’t use the social norms of today to judge the actions and events that took place in past eras.
Well… they are loud and wrong.
Just because everybody is doing something doesn’t make it right.
Slavery is wrong now, and it was wrong then.
For as long as Africans have been trafficked and enslaved, there have been abolitionists who have spoken up against it.
The first slave ship landed in America in 1619.
Opposition to chattel slavery was voiced and mentioned in passing in documents, but in 1688, the Germantown Friends, a group of Quakers, put out a formal, written protest against slavery.
In it, they wrote, “Now, though they are black, we cannot conceive there is more liberty to have them slaves as it is to have other white ones.
There is a saying, that we shall do to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are.”
Excellencies, Mr Secretary General, erasure begins with language, when words are used as a sleight of hand, to gaslight, to trick you into doubting what you know to be true.
It is when words are used to create mythology; when they are spoken, the volume gradually decreases with each repetition until it becomes a full verbal redaction.
The legendary American jazz player, Miles Davis, said, “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.”
When it comes to the contributions that Africa has made to enriching Europe and building the so-called New World, the silence is deafening.
We have paved roads through mountains and put down railroad tracks; we have constructed buildings, laying brick after brick; we have cut sugar cane, picked cotton and cocoa, descended into mines to unearth precious metals and stones; we have wet-nursed babies.
We have paid the price of admission with the blood of our ancestors, and still, what greets us at the door is silence.
What we are met with is mythology.
In 2015, McGraw-Hill Education, one of the largest publishers in the US, released a geography textbook used in over 1,000 school districts in Texas.
The book stated that millions of workers were brought from Africa to work on agricultural plantations.
Workers…not enslaved people.
A family complained, and the book was pulled off the shelves.
There is a US organisation called Prager U. On the organisation’s website, it’s described as “the world’s leading conservative nonprofit that is focused on changing minds through the creative use of digital media.”
They’ve created animated videos used as supplemental educational material in public school classrooms in 11 states.
In one video, a young boy and his teenage sister are confused about why some people celebrate Columbus Day, and others celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day.
They use a time travel app and find themselves on a ship with Christopher Columbus, who tells them all about how the Carib people, the indigenous people of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean, were violent, uncivilised cannibals.
The children then ask him to explain why he’d enslaved people.
To that, Christopher Columbus responds: “Slavery is as old as time, and it has taken place in every corner of the world.
Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?
I don’t see the problem.”
Columbus then accuses the children of coming to his time and judging him by the standards of their time.”
In another PragerU animated video, the same brother and sister use the time travel app and find themselves in 1852, standing in front of Frederick Douglass.
He tells them that he is working to abolish slavery, a system in which people make other people work for long hours with no pay.
“The sad fact,” he explains, “is that slavery has existed everywhere in the world for thousands of years.”
In the United States, Black history courses are being removed from school curricula; schools are being mandated to stop teaching students about slavery, segregation, and racism in American history courses.
Books about those topics are being banned in schools and public libraries.
Museums, art centres, and other institutions whose budgets rely in any way on public funds are being prohibited from scheduling exhibitions and programs, or from displaying materials promoting racial awareness or Black history.