Let's take advantage of our circumstances - Akufo-Addo

Ghana today is well-positioned for progressive healthy growth. There are many reasons why we should be optimistic about our future prosperity. But it takes hard work. It takes dedication. It takes a commitment to ensure that the security of the individual and the state is protected and promoted. Whether at the community, regional or national level, we have time-tested institutions which have sustained and held us together these past fifty years, a feat worthy of celebration.
We have lived in peace and harmony, taking pride in our ethnic and traditional identities and being each other’s keeper. It is in this vein that the President in his state of the nation address appealed to our traditional societies “to be mindful of the need for peace as the bedrock of development and as a result shun all matters that will degenerate into conflicts and instability.”
In my view, we only become victims of circumstances when we fail to take full advantage of them. Our circumstances, like the aphorism, may be seen either half-full or half-empty. Fortunately, in spite of the seeming crescendo of the voices of the very few doomsday commentators, ours is a nation of people of hope. The road to prosperity is for those who see the cup as half-full. The capacity to appreciate your achievements in the midst of challenges is the best way to facilitate the realisation of your potential. This is a nation of good people, excellent humanity, and great potential. The renaissance is on, beginning once again at where it started fifty years ago, Ghana.
It can be infuriating when you hear hackneyed phrases of prejudice and stereotype, that this or that area of Ghana is conflict-prone; that these or those people are violently obstinate, peevish, crotchety, cranky, irascible, or plain cantankerous. There are several inter-related factors that cause certain areas to become conflict zones. But my experience in this country – from east to west, and north to south – has convinced me, beyond the gloomy clouds of prejudice, that no clan, ethnic group, community, region or class of Ghanaians has a genetic predisposition for violence or do-nothingness.
We are all a peace loving people. However, in order to forge a brighter future, it is essential that we foster an understanding of obstacles from our past legacy, ranging from poverty, lack of educational and economic opportunity, and a history of political abuse, economic mismanagement, corruption, marginalisation (perceived or real) and a feeling of injustice, which have fueled some of the conflicts we have all witnessed in certain parts of the country. We must use this understanding of our history to navigate our future course and avoid repeating past mistakes.
In our nearly fifty years of Independence, we have undergone a whole gamut of experiences, most of them unpleasant, but with the coming in of the Fourth Republic, what must be total is the commitment to leave behind us for good the old culture of systematic violations of human rights, involving mass detentions, unexplained disappearances of hundreds of persons, the arbitrary seizures of private properties, and ethnocentricism. No more shall we allow the crop of our youth to be hypnotised and driven to a future of nigh hopelessness and uncertainties by the purveyors of false populism.
In Ghana today we are living the era of positive change. Not the kind of change that threatens the very foundation of existence; not the kind that is promised by the gun and killed by the gun; not the kind that is motivated by hatred and intolerance; not the kind that assaults enterprise and frightens away initiative; not the kind that saps our self-confidence and plunges a bayonet through the heart of patriotism.
What is happening in our country today is not a reactionary change, one that turns the clock back. It is a profound transformation, which is deep, effective and focused on the construction of the new Ghana, where the democratic culture is at the core of her body politic. You may call it in three words: Development in Freedom.
However, we should not automatically assume that there is a correlation between economic prosperity and reduced levels of violence, even if pervasive poverty and violence have appeared related in our past. In the 1950s and 1960s, social scientists widely believed in the modernisation theory, which posited that over time economic development would lead to the weakening of communal identities. But as the crime rates of Pretoria, New York and London suggest, even prosperity has its own problems if it leaves some human casualties behind.
Therefore, Ghana’s economic development can only succeed if it is inclusive. Thankfully, inclusiveness is an instinctive feature of our own traditional political culture, and it is a defining feature of our indigenous leaders. In the modern world, when you educate a person, you may still be educating one person; but in Ghana, whether you educate a man or a woman, you are as likely as not educating a whole village, at least indirectly.
Part of our traditional identity requires that a sense of achievement entails one’s ability to spread that achievement and enhance one’s family name, so there is an automatic distribution of benefits among many extended dependents and associates – this includes one’s elders, nieces and nephews, village kith and home town kin.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. But a society can only help the poor when the poor are willing and ready to pick up the tools of entrepreneurship. Our success depends on the enterprise of our people all over the country. From all the four corners of this blessed land of ours, with its rich diversity, Ghana has managed to develop a society with a strong sense of community, comprising a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural set of peoples.
Essentially, we must pursue economic development strategies which acknowledge the reality of this diversity and the economically disruptive potential of strife, be it ethnic, chieftancy or whatever. This is because minimising regional cleavages and community tensions may be as important a contributor to economic growth as diversifying a nation’s industrial base or promoting exports.
In other words, in our pursuit of prosperity, we must seek to strike a balance between economic development and conflict management strategies. There may be no simple formula for designing such policies, but development economists agree on some common-sense strategies. One is to reduce or avoid sharp disparities in regional investment allocations. The next, in my view, is to sign ourselves up to an unconditional adherence to the rule of law, starting from the top to the bottom, north to south, east to west. Rule of law and the maintenance of law and order must prevail without fear or favour, irrespective of one’s social standing.
The New Patriotic Party is on course to empower communities and individuals in Ghana. Ghana is fifty this year. A new chapter, and the script for a new history that draws on our chequered history is in the process of being written. The beginning of this history is about people, power, freedom, discipline, law and order and responsibility. On top of all this must be added conspicuously and boldly the can-do spirit. That spirit that can raise our level of enterprise to greater heights. Our mothers keep it hiding in the kitchen, our uncles and aunts keep it under wraps in the informal sector, but we need to bring that can-do spirit, that self-determination and persevering strength, into the front and centre of our institutions and protect, nurture, support, reward and build on it.
Government has a role to play in seeing that this happens – both by creating a favourable economic environment for enterprise (particularly small and medium size enterprises), and by equipping our people with the skills and education, particularly in science and technology, to enable them to make the most of the opportunities these sectors offer. But, the role of Government will be meaningless unless it enjoys the total commitment, sacrifice and passion of the individuals and communities, making up a nation.

The author is Ghana’s Foreign Minister and MP for Abuakwa South. He’s also aspiring to become the Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party