Understanding Mahama’s ideology: A new paradigm shift for a successful Ghana

National development entails stages and processes that must be carefully
followed, strategized, and implemented in order to enhance the living standards of the citizenry.

Walt Whitman Rostow is an American economist and one of the greatest thinkers in the 21st century’s development studies. He developed his theory for national development, which assumed that modernisation was characterised by the Western world, which was able to advance from the initial stages of underdevelopment.

Using this model, Rostow penned his classic stages of economic growth in 1960 and presented five steps through which developing countries can pass to achieve development: traditional society, preconditions to take off, drive to maturity, and the age of high mass consumption. The model asserted that all countries exist somewhere on this linear spectrum and climb upward through each stage in the development process.

After winning the 2012 general elections, former president John Dramani Mahama
adopted the Rostow model to develop this country after several decades of
haphazard approaches that have led us nowhere. The former president resourced the traditional authorities in order to strengthen our society. It was during this era that the chieftaincy institution was given the maximum recognition it deserved.

The former president embarked on a massive infrastructural revolution never experienced under the Fourth Republic. Relating this to Rostow’s model, the infrastructural revolution was to serve as the country’s “preconditions to take-off," without which this country will keep moving in a manner that lacks any obvious principle of organisation and direction.

The “preconditions to take-off” entail the installation of physical infrastructure, such as roads, schools, hospitals, markets, and ports. The former president intelligently and deliberately focused his attention on massively improving the infrastructural conditions in the country.

This ideology of the former president is a novel approach and a new paradigm
shift that actualizes Rostow’s model to ensure that Ghana achieves the
“preconditions to take off.”. In national development, the most difficult thing is attaining the “precondition to take-off” status; it leads to "take-off,” which lessens the burden on subsequent governments and transforms the standards of living of generations that follow.

Having lived in the UK for close to two decades, I have not seen any government from Tony Blair to Rishi Sunak construct a new hospital, airport, university, secondary or primary school, or new stretch of road in the whole period of my stay. Previous governments have ensured that all this infrastructure is available; therefore, subsequent governments do not shoulder these burdens; they only embark on the maintenance of this infrastructure. That was the “precondition to take-off” that led to “take-off” and consequently propelled the UK to its current state.

Let us imagine a Ghana where the government does not have to build schools,
hospitals, airports, markets, construct roads, and ask ourselves what would be
our standards of living as Ghanaians. Governments would have been able to
build social housing, offer workers decent salaries, and pay unemployment
benefits, housing benefits, child benefits and access to finance to the private
sector to expand and employ the youth, as witnessed in the advanced economies. This is the Ghana former president John Mahama was building, the
Ghana he will build if elected in 2024.

This is the ideology of former president Mahama, which was unfortunately
truncated by the malicious and fabricated vicious lies of the NPP in 2016
general elections, leading us to the current predicament. If Ghanaians had
understood former president Mahama’s ideology and allowed him to continue
his massive infrastructural drive deliberately initiated to take us to the
“precondition to take-off” and eventually “take-off” stage of development,
Ghana would have seen massive development never witnessed in Sub-Sahara
Africa.

In view of this, Ghanaians must vote for the NDC in the 2024 general elections
in order to see the implementation of a tried-and-tested framework that has
led to social and economic development in the Western world. We cannot be doing the same thing and expect different results; therefore, we need a new paradigm shift to focus on a specific area of development that is required for a developing country to develop at an appreciable pace, i.e., an infrastructural revolution. Former President Mahama is the man with the clear plan, direction, and purpose required for a successful Ghana.