Okyehene damns centrality of governance

Accra, Nov 7, GNA - The Okyehene, Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori Panin II, on Tuesday condemned the gross unfairness in the distribution of the national cake, saying out of 48,000 settlements in the country only 12,000 had government agencies such as post offices, hospitals and police stations.

There was no justification for neglecting 36,000 settlements in the distribution of basic infrastructure and utilities, he said. The Okyehene made the remark at the dual launch of a Ghana@50 Documentary on Population and Development and a campaign by Miss Ghana@50, Frances Judith Takyi-Mensah to end Obstetric Fistula in Ghana. The United Nations Population Fund documentary captured the history of population growth in Ghana from 1957 would be shown on TV stations across the country.

Osagyefo Ofori Panin blamed neglect of the larger majority of the population in the allocation of national infrastructure on centralised government saying that, "the central government system we inherited from the British colonial master was only good for the 6.5 million people in the country in 1957 but it is not working for the 22 million people in 2007."

He kicked against what he called "the obsession of the centrality of government" which required the larger portion of the population to travel to the seat of the central government to have access to basic facilities and service or to travel outside the country. "It is woefully unfair that after 50 year we have not been able to transform a single village into a town because government after government in this country is obsessed with the centrality of government and so the large chunk of development infrastructure is located at the seat of government to the detriment of the greater majority of our people.

"We cannot continue to build and run our country that way for 50 years and expect progress, no matter who the government of the day is," he said.

Osagyefo Ofori Panin also noted that building the private sector with foreign investment was not the way to go, saying, "Ghana's economy, the way it is now, stood the risk of a crush if the Nigerian Banks, MTN and a few others foreign owned businesses decided to exit and take their investments with them.

"I am neither a politician nor an engineer but I have interacted with wisdom long enough to know that we can only experience true economic development when we empower our own people across the rank and file of the nation to able our people develop their potential to the fullest instead of creating conditions for foreign investors to flock into our country," he said.

He noted that currently 10,000 people died in African everyday due to poverty, not because African nations were poor, but because the greater majority of African did not have access to the basic services, much more the wealth in their countries.

"I believe the challenge we face in Africa is not necessarily that of population explosion but of poverty, because if we are able to commit ourselves to spread the national resources across board through the fair distribution of infrastructure across our countries, we can prevent lots of the unnecessary deaths," he said.

He said population explosion was an inevitable storm, which could not be stopped, but its effects could be mitigated through fair distribution of the national cake.

Osagyefo Ofori Panin noted for instance that some of the 850 villages in his Akyem Abuakwa Kingdom, people had to walk at least two miles to get access to a health facility.

Nana Akomea, MP and Minister of Manpower Youth and Employment, noted that poverty was a result of population explosion in that the inability of a people to feed themselves with the food available to them at a time was due to the size of their population. He said at the current rate of the population growth rate of 2.7 per cent, Ghana's economy needed to grow at least three times higher than the population in order for the basic social needs of the people to be in place.

"We would need to grow at a rate of at least 10 per cent to provide a better living standard - but at the moment we are even struggling at about six per cent growth, which is not enough to even meet the basic needs of the people," he said.