ghananlpcommunity/ghana-gov-speeches-sentences huggingface dataset:
This does not seem like the year of recovery the Government is telling us that 2015 will be and the new Budget is hardly the budget for transforming our economy.
The situation now is worse than we were in a year ago; 2013 was worse than 2012; and 2012 was worse than 2011.
Yet, this was the Ghana that was so successful in managing its non-oil economy that, in 2009, the US President, Barack Obama, was able to call Ghana the poster child for a great story of “Africa Rising”.
Five years later, on August 5 this year, the Financial Times carried the headline: “Ghana tarnishes ‘Africa Rising’ story”, as we were forced to run back to the IMF for a bailout.
We had worked hard to wean ourselves off dependence on the IMF to enable us undertake the growth that would transform our nation.
Now with oil, Ghana is on a downward slope.
The sudden and calamitous decline has left many friends, many institutions, many investors, totally perplexed.
How did it all go so spectacularly wrong?
If we are to succeed in securing our future, we must succeed in securing the public purse.
Governments are elected to offer creative solutions to the problems that face a country.
Corruption, or to call it by the name that we all understand, the naked theft of public funds, will destroy Ghana and her future if we do not take a firm stand against it.
Corruption is undermining confidence in our governance system and that is dangerous for all of us.
We have to deal with it, and do so urgently.
Our law enforcement agencies - Ministries of Justice and Interior, the Police Service, EOCO, CHRAJ, the Office of the Auditor General et al – have to be reformed and strengthened so that they can fulfil effectively their primary goals of ensuring the security of the nation and protecting our population from criminal activity, no matter its source.
Above all, the leadership of the nation – the President, the Vice President, Ministers of State, District Chief Executives, Members of Parliament, Political Leaders, Judges and Magistrates – must demonstrate, by their example, that, indeed, they are up for the fight.
Our people need to have that firm assurance now, not just by words or pious declarations, but by concrete deeds.
Our future security as a peaceful, stable, democratic State depends on it.
In a recent speech in London, Mahamudu Bawumia produced a list of flagship projects from the past six years that the Government put in the 2015 Budget, and noted: “All these signature projects sum up to some $3.5 billion out of the increase in total debt by the equivalent, at the time of borrowing, of some $27 billion .
So, where is the rest of the money?”
The issue becomes even clearer when the 21 projects are subjected to value-for-money scrutiny.
Let’s pick just one: the eleventh project on the list: the Kasoa Interchange, which is to be constructed at the cost of $172 million.
I have already made reference to this particular project and the cost on some other occasions.
I come back to it to make an example of the point I am making and also because those who know about these matters have expressed anxiety to me.
I also take on board the explanation that government spokespersons have offered about why the cost appears bloated when compared to the cost of building the six-lane N1 Highway, with two interchanges, and the paying of compensation for those whose properties had to give way for the road.
I accept that the government is not building an ordinary interchange.
But as I have said, many have expressed deep anxieties about the cost and it is definitely one of the things leading to the perception of corruption in government.
I want to make a humble suggestion to His Excellency the President.
Check the figures!
Check them again!
Invite others in an international open tender and let’s see if we can’t save the nation more than half of what you have signed us up to pay.
The President certainly does not have to listen to me, he might very well think he is within his rights and he might even think to go back on a decision he has already made and subject the contract to a second look would be a truly unprecedented act.
Yes, it would be unprecedented, but it would show strength rather than weakness on the part of the President and it could lead to a regeneration of trust in our governance process.
Try it, Mr.
President and let’s see what happens.
To make that breakthrough in our economy, we need to do more than fight corruption and manage our economy competently.
We need to think big and we need to grow our economy.
Fighting corruption and managing our economy competently will save us a lot of money to fund many of the things we need to do.
But if we are truly to transform our economy to meet the needs of our population and project us into the 21st century, we have no choice but to industrialize our economy and modernize its agriculture.
Agriculture is obviously an area with the most urgent need for attention.
Throughout the ages, most nations have started their industrialization process through the modernization and diversification of agriculture.
Our farmers are still depending on the rudimentary instruments that other nations now place in their museums.
It is not likely that we can hope to feed ourselves when the farming methods are still rooted in the nineteenth century.
We have to look again at the bold attempt made in the Kufuor era to promote the diversification of our agriculture by the President’s Special Initiatives, which concentrated on industrial starch (i.e.
cassava), oil palm and industrial salt.
To these, were also added garments and textiles.
They were laudable initiatives.
We have been hearing the President urge all of us to patronize made in Ghana goods, including eating what we grow, and indeed, we should but it is more important that the Ministry of Agriculture and our extension officers help our farmers to modernize their methods, to package their products attractively and make their costs competitive to imported ones.
In such circumstances, we would not need to coax anybody to patronize made in Ghana goods, or foodstuffs.
We could then bring an end to the highly disturbing development that has seen our imported food-bill rise in the Mills-Mahama era from $600 million to $1.5 billion.
Again, deeds, not words, are what are required.
The last Millennium Challenge Account had an agriculture sector programme.
There are successful farm projects doted around the country based on the programme.
The original idea was for these farms to serve as learning centres for other farmers in the communities; strangely there has been no sign of anybody learning from these farms and their methods.
It would be sad if the lessons from the Millennium Challenge Account were left to wither away without leaving any lasting effects.
It is not too late to make these projects play the roles they were intended to play and serve as hubs for the modernization of agriculture.
Securing the future is about how rapidly we transform the economy to expand it and create jobs for our youth.
The entrepreneurial quality of the Ghanaian people is not in doubt.
It needs nurturing and support.
We have to take the bull by the horns and create explicitly the conditions for enterprise in both the formal and informal sectors to succeed.
We can no longer continue to mouth clichés about the private sector being the engine of growth and leaving the matter there.
We need to match our words with our deeds.
Fiscal, monetary and regulatory policies have to coincide to create an environment for enterprise to flourish, and thus hasten the industrial and economic development of our nation.
Incentives must be given to enterprise just as incentives must be given to workers to excel.
That is the twin-track to economic success.
It has succeeded elsewhere.
It can succeed here in Ghana.
Securing the future is about ensuring our workers a decent pension after retirement.
It has been a sad spectacle watching the recent struggle over the Tier Two Pension between Government and the Unions.
The National Pensions Act 2008 (Act 766) was introduced by the NPP because we saw the need to secure a better future for pensioners and get a critical mass of capital into the money market for long-term investment.
It was enacted to complement the work of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust.
The way forward in the current impasse is self-evident: let Government take its hands off the pension till and allow the scheme to work as it was intended to do.
Let the workers have the decisive say on how their privately managed funds are run.
If it means amending the law for greater clarity, let us do so.
Let us thus demonstrate our confidence in the private sector and this is bound to send out positive signals to the money markets around the world that Ghana is indeed open for business.
Securing our future means taking care of our environment.
The Almighty blessed our land and we have a responsibility to take care of the environment.
Our forests, our trees, our rivers and lakes are not commodities we can abuse.
We do not own the land; we hold it in trust for generations yet unborn.
Nor do we have the right to denude our lands or seas and rivers of the animals and fishes indiscriminately.
Climate change is a reality that we live with, we can see for ourselves the southward march of the Sahara.
There are young Ghanaians today who do not know that our country used to be covered with thick forests.
Indeed today, we are importing timber.
Securing our future means we have to learn to take care of our environment.
Take a look around us, and look at the number of places that have been allowed to disintegrate for lack of maintenance.
The number of roads, which once constructed, are never repaired; the number of houses, which once built, never get a coat of paint or walls which have been left to collapse because no-one bothered to replace a block at the correct time.
We seem to have developed a culture of building beautiful things and leaving them to deteriorate.
From the personal to the national, we construct, but, we do not take care of what we have.
We are more interested in building new things than in taking care of what we already have.
If we are to succeed as a nation, we must develop a culture of maintenance.
Our public buildings, our private houses, once constructed, must not be left to the vagaries of the elements until they deteriorate to the point where they cannot be repaired.
We must learn to take care of what we do have, however little.
The challenge is not only how many kilometers of new roads we are able to build this year, but also how well we maintain the ones already constructed.
At the 2012 presidential debate, the President said he already had programmes in place to make load shedding a thing of the past by the end of 2013.
Recently on Paul Adom Otchere’s “Good Evening Ghana” on Metro TV, the President gave us a new promise.
What is this new promise?
He is promising to stop giving us promises.
To us in the NPP, reliable, affordable energy supply is the lifeline of our overall vision to transform the Ghanaian economy into a modern industrialised one.
We know we cannot secure the future without electricity to power our plans into that future.
So solving once and for all, the culture of load shedding and mismanagement in the energy sector is a major priority for us.
The recent extension of load shedding to industries puts the entire economy and its capacity to attract new investment into grave danger.
We know we cannot speak of industrialisation when we cannot give hairdressers and barbers electricity to stay in business.
The future of our children is threatened when they have no light in their schools to study.
Ghana is currently experiencing one of her worst levels of economic growth, job losses and income losses, partly because of an energy crisis we could have avoided.
The current energy crisis was avoidable and can be avoided in the future.
The energy crisis can be fixed and we intend to fix it with a long-term sustainable integrated energy plan that will start yielding results, if given the opportunity to win power to deliver power.
We are happy about the news that finally, Ghana’s largest ever private sector-built power plant, the $900m, 350MW plant by Cenpower in Kpone, which started nine years ago under President Kufuor, is taking off, bringing on board one of the major global players in the energy sector, the Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo.
But, the challenges faced by the Kpone power project over the last few years is in itself a powerful reminder that we need to set the right market conditions to attract many more of such investments.
Ghanaians have shown that they are prepared to pay for electricity to go about their business.
All they ask for is value for money; which means reasonably priced reliable supply.
Investors, also, will put their money in our energy sector when they know that they will be paid and make profit, and that our currency will be stable and inflation will be tamed.
Beyond macro-economic issues and integrity of contract, another major challenge to growth posed by Ghana's power sector is not primarily a matter of limited generating capacity, but rather one of poor reliability.
That is why, in spite of Ghana’s installed capacity of 3000MW, we still cannot meet our peak demand of 2000MW.
Again, this can be fixed.
We will do so, first, by appointing people who can do the work, set them clear goals and give them the resources and independence to deliver.
We will ensure value for money in all procurement contracts.
We must bring to an end the situation where consumers are forced to subsidise corruption and inefficiency in the power sector.
Let me stress, we will pursue vigorously a policy of greater private sector participation in the ownership and management of power generation.
We see greater private sector investment and a strong, independent regulatory institution as necessary to securing Ghana’s future energy needs.
Securing power for our citizens and industries will require new and significant, competitive investments in a mix of power generation, (including hydro, gas, solar, etc.
), distribution, and energy efficiency.
Securing the future requires us to appreciate that our economy must be competitive and that the project of regional and continental economic integration is the way to go.
Intra-African trade currently stands at 12 percent of total trade, compared to 60 percent for Europe, 40 percent for North America, and 30 percent for ASEAN, according to statistics cited by the WTO.
In 2012, the AU agreed to set up the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) in 2017.
Interestingly, COMESA, the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) intend to launch a tripartite Free Trade Area encompassing 26 member states from the three regional blocs, with a total population of 625 million people and an economy of $1.2 trillion.
West Africa risks being left behind!
This FTA has half of the continent's countries being part, controlling 58% of Africa's GDP.
West African leaders must wake up!
Ghana which seeks to transform and modernise its economy, has to take the lead in bringing about a genuine regional market of some 350 million people out of ECOWAS, which will provide a ready market for Ghanaian goods and services.
Securing the future is about how we keep our country together, peacefully.
Securing the future means safeguarding our democracy by securing the integrity of our elections; that is why we must all support electoral reforms which even the majority on the Supreme Court advocated.
We want to get to a situation where we can all readily accept the results of regular, fair elections and thereby bolster our stability.
We do not need repetitions of narrow decisions in the Supreme Court after tortuous, delicate proceedings.
Brinksmanship will ultimately destroy our democracy.
As I go round our country, what I see confirms me in my belief that we have to change the way we do things.
I live in the faith that the sky is the limit for Ghana.
What inspires me is that we are a nation of able, gifted people who are desperate to help our nation become great and strong.
We need to nurture all our talents to build a new society of prosperity.
That is the mission of the NPP, the party that I lead.
What is the tyranny that the majority of our people continue to strive against but have yet to vanquish?
In a word: poverty.
We must wage a relentless war on it.
Joseph Boakye Danquah warned against our communities becoming ignorant “of the causes of the physical conditions which paralyse action”.
We must remember our legacy; we must be guided by our past mistakes and the wisdom born of experience.
We must stride into the future, confident that we will make it if we work at it.
And in order to do all this, we must believe in our capacity to achieve the greatness that others have achieved.
We must believe in Ghana and do what is right by our nation, and thereby fulfil the dreams and aspirations of those far-sighted individuals, who assembled at Saltpond on that most seminal of days of 4th August 1947, to initiate the steps for our national freedom and independence.
Their goal remains our goal – the creation of a free, democratic, prosperous nation governed under the rule of law, capable of making its own special contribution to the growth of world civilisation.
With the guidance of the Almighty, we can make it and secure our future.
Thank you and may God bless Ghana and Africa.
It was with great pleasure, tinged with considerable sadness, that I accepted the invitation from my good friend, Kwasi Abeasi, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Aliu Mahama Foundation, to be the second speaker in the series of the Foundation’s Annual Memorial Lectures.
In a recent speech in London, Mahamudu Bawumia produced a list of flagship projects from the past six years that the Government put in the 2015 Budget, and noted: “ All these signature projects sum up to some $3.5 billion out of the increase in total debt by the equivalent, at the time of borrowing, of some $27 billion .
SPEECH BY NANA AKUFO-ADDO, AT SYMPOSIUM ORGANISED BY THE ROYAL AFRICAN SOCIETY AND THE CENTRE OF AFRICAN STUDIES, SOAS, AT THE BRUNEI SUIT, SOAS, ON 3RD MARCH 2014, ON: 'GHANA, 57 YEARS AFTER 1957: RECALIBRATING THE COURSE OF PROGRESS' Our illustrious chairperson, Lord Paul Boateng of Akyem & Wembley, respected Ghanaian Foreign Minister, Hannah Tetteh, Ghana’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Prof Danso-Boafo, Research Associate of the Centre for African Studies, SOAS, Dr Michael Amoah, fellow panelist and Vice President of Teneo Holdings, Manji Cheto, fellow Ghanaians, ladies and gentlemen.
I thank the organisers, the Royal African Society and the Centre for African Studies of SOAS, for this occasion, which has put our country of Ghana into focus on the eve of the 57th anniversary of her independence.
It is a welcome spot light.
Our late President, Prof J E A Mills, was an illustrious alumnus of this prestigious university, SOAS.
To complete the protocol, let me use this occasion also to congratulate publicly (albeit belatedly) our chairperson for his membership of the famous British House of Lords.
It is a fitting tribute to a distinguished career in British politics.
As a fellow Akyem, I am happy to note that he is flying the flag in that august body.
More grease to your elbow, your Lordship.
It is entirely appropriate, at a time when our lives are dominated by engineers and nanotechnologists, that the discussion of Ghana’s future progress should be framed in the language of engineers and the modern learning.
Hopefully, it is not an accident for I, a lawyer and a product of the old learning, to be invited to participate in this discourse.
Be that as it may, my layman’s understanding is that to calibrate is to set or measure and recalibrate is to reset.
After 57 years of independence, should we reset the course of Ghana’s progress?
I believe we should.
The large crowd of chiefs and people, including Paa Grant, Danquah, Obestebi- Lamptey, R S Blay, Cobinna Kesse, Ofori-Atta, Ako-Adjei, Akufo-Addo, et al, who gathered on that fateful Saturday of 4th August 1947, 67 years ago, in the historic city of Saltpond, to launch Ghana’s first nationalist organisation, the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC of blessed memory), were heavily influenced by the imminent approach of India’s independence, which was barely a week away.
They would employ the same Gandhian, peaceful, nonviolent means to achieve freedom and national independence for the Gold Coast, which they agreed to rename Ghana.
Their vision was clear: they would build a new modern, united African nation, free of foreign and domestic oppression, which would be grounded on the principles of democratic accountability and the rule of law.
Despite the subsequent division of the nationalist movement into its conservative and radical wings with the arrival in the country of Nkrumah four months later, this proved to be the enduring vision of Ghana’s march towards freedom.
In fulfillment of this vision, Ghana achieved independence peacefully as a thriving democracy and, under Kwame Nkrumah’s dynamic leadership, became, on the 6th March 1957, the hope for Africa.
The rich possibilities of Ghana for her people and the wider African people were, however, tragically subverted by the descent into authoritarian rule during the First Republic and the ensuing decades of instability, characterised by a series of military coups.
Ghana managed to achieve the unenviable feat of four republics within a period of 35 years.
(It took France 150 years to achieve five republics).
Not only did this period experience widespread violations of the human rights of the Ghanaian people, it also marked a significant decline in the living standards of the people.
PROSPECTS FOR THE 4TH REPUBLIC Fortunately for the progress of the country, on April 28, 1992, in the historic referendum of that date, the Ghanaian people, by an overwhelming margin, endorsed democratic governance, as established by the Constitution of the Fourth Republic.
We have witnessed under the 4th Republic the longest period of stable, constitutional rule in our history.
Instructively, these last 21 years have also brought about significant progress in Ghana’s economic growth and human development.
However, we cannot take public confidence in our democracy for granted.
Leadership carries the burden of strengthening public confidence in the capacity of our young democracy to deliver where it matters most: improving the lives of the people.
What, then, are the prospects for the future?
I believe those prospects are directly tied to our ability to overcome three basic challenges frustrating the course of our progress.
The first is the institutional challenge.
A paramount concern of our time has to be the consolidation of Ghanaian democracy, requiring the strengthening of our institutions of state, particularly, in their capacity to deliver results and to be accountable to the people.
The most direct way of so doing is for all Ghanaians to accept to play by the rules we have set for ourselves in our national constitution and in our laws.
Playing by the rules also means enforcing those very rules.
By this, we can deal with corruption and abuse and theft of public funds.
It is critical to the process of recalibrating the course of Ghana’s progress.
We must have a public sector that is efficient in delivering universal access to good quality education, healthcare, legal remedies, personal security and basic infrastructure.
The second challenge is the transformation of the Ghanaian economy.
Today’s digital revolution and the fierce pace of technology mean that knowledge, skills, technology, creativity and capital have become very mobile, making them more important in determining where production takes place rather than the location of natural resources.
How ready are we, though, to meet the challenge to our ability to promote national prosperity and protect national security, knowing all too well that the biggest threat to our social and political stability is the phenomenon of widespread youth unemployment.
As one travels across the villages, towns and cities of Ghana, one cannot help but notice the large numbers of able-bodied young persons who are idle.