Opanin Kwami Agbodza, with respect, the job of the military in our country, is to protect Ghana's territorial integrity - and that is a full time job: not a part-time one. Period.
Massa, being a Ghanaian soldier is not some Micky-mouse job to which such well-trained professionals can return to, from time to time, as and when they take time off, from the rather onerous task of governing the Ghanaian nation-state - which you appear to advocate they should be allowed to participate in. Incredible!
Secondly, Massa, with respect, are you too not putting yourself into precisely the same kind of ideological straightjacket that the Alan Greenspans of the Western world, whom you mention, put themselves into - with such disastrous consequences: the painful results of which we are all witnesses to, today, as virtually the whole world tips into a recession?
Nothing beats the pragmatic and non-ideological approach to nation-building, Massa: Look what the neo-conservative ideologues of America, led by Dick Cheney and Co., have done to their great country today - because they trapped themselves in a straightjacket in becoming ideologues!
May I also humbly suggest that you please leave Nkrumah to rest in peace? He was, above all, a pragmatist who welcomed honest private businesspeople: as long as they were socially and environmentally responsible - be they foreign or local. Massa, Nkrumah was no ideologue. Period.
Please read his speech at the opening of the GAIP oil refinery in 1963 - in which he praised the Italian investors, as the kind of honest businesspeople Africa could work with to develop itself: to our mutual benefit.
Massa, contrary to what many people think (including many of his present-day followers who are so ill-informed about him!), Nkrumah's idea of socialism, in strictly economic terms, is actually more akin to the economic model that the Chinese communists have been using to grow their country so dramatically.
Please read his letter of 26th February, 1964 to US President Johnson (source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Special Head of State Correspondence File, Ghana - Presidential Correspondence). As usual, that pan-Africanist and political genius, whose equal has not yet been born, was far ahead of his time.
Massa, with respect, I suggest that you leave Nkrumah out of your own unique and (as my neighbour, a precocious boy aged 11, commented!) “rather bizarre ideological construct” - which you obviously think is the political equivalent of a Tsunami that no doubt will soon sweep the world: and make the black race, masters of the universe?
Yes, we must have self-belief as Africans - but is talk about world dominance not as arrogant a notion as that held by the odious white supremacists of this world? Ditto brown and yellow supremacists?
Massa, we are all members of the one human race, are we not? Is that not a more peaceful and positive way to proceed - especially at a time of global climate change: when humankind faces the most perilous phase of our existence on the planet Earth, than all that negative black master-race stuff?
As for your opinions about Nana Akufo-Addo, well, I have nothing to say about that - as I loathe the ethos of selfishness and unfathomable greed that underpins the party he belongs to: and which has ruined our country with its unparalleled incompetence in governing Ghana, these last eight years. However, as a fellow human being, I must confess that I rather like him - as his family and mine have had links going back to the 1920’s.
It’s a pity that he did not beat the disastrous President Kufuor for his party’s candidature for the presidency in 2000 - as in my view he would have done far better than Mr. Kufour has. Sadly, he is eight years too late - and I hope his party is voted out of power, today, Sunday 7th December 2008: as any other party will be far better than this regime: one sadly characterized by amorality, dishonesty and the incredible greed we have all been so horrified by.
As Justice Kpegah so pithily puts it, the ruling regime has come to its wit’s end. Long ago, some of us suggested that instead of making forays into the piranha-infested waters of the capital markets of the West (just so that they could get kickbacks from the fat fees their cronies in our financial services companies were earning for doing absolutely nothing!), it was rather in the long-term interest of our country to raise funds to develop our country with, through a strategic partnership with the Chinese.
We suggested that that could be done by issuing them with our sovereign bonds in exchange for the best- resourced Chinese state-owned companies partnering Ghana's own state-owned companies (all structured to give workers a 10 per cent stake, private Ghanaians 40 per cent, purchased from the stock market, and the Ghanaian nation-state 50 per cent - to ensure maximum productivity!) in joint-ventures to build our infrastructure.
An example of such a partnership, could have been used to get one of the best-resourced of the Chinese construction companies to collaborate with our own State Housing Corporation to fund the building of hundreds of thousands of affordable and good quality houses for renting out to ordinary Ghanaians nationwide, at affordable rental rates - to free them from the clutches of the selfish and greedy landlords of Ghana, permanently! It could have been funded by issuing the Chinese government with our sovereign bonds, in exchange for their funding the project.
If those incompetents had listened to us, we would not be back to square one today - suffering from “debt distress” and flat broke!
The outrage, for some of us, in all this, is that having benefitted from debt relief (although they themselves, like the rest of our political class, neither had the nous or the gumption to fight for debt-relief, whiles some of us were fighting for debt-relief in the 1990’s!), these well-educated morons, have piled up yet more debt to the extent that today it is bleeding our country to death, again.
Incredibly, they have succeeded in landing us in exactly the same difficulties we were experiencing during the NDC-era - when interest payments on our unsustainable external debt, then, was sucking the very lifeblood out of our country. Pity.
Surprising though it might be to some, indigenous Ghanaian businesspeople, actually have a role to play in our development, too – but only those amongst them who are socially and environmentally responsible : who will always pay their taxes, pay their workers a fair wage, and will not pollute our natural environment, under any circumstances.
If our political class were imaginative enough, instead of constantly mouthing platitudes about private sector development, they would make Ghana the nation with the lowest corporate tax rate (9 per cent!) and abolish personal income tax for all who live in Ghana - to grow the real econonmy.
If they followed that by undertaking genuine land reform in Ghana, by taking over all land held in trust for their peope by our traditional rulers and redistributing same to landless peasants in rural Ghana, and keeping the rest in a state-owned land bank to be made available to investors in agriculture, which must be made a tax-fee business for all who engage in it (not only cocoa farmers), we will power ahead in spite of the global recession.
Hmmm, Ghana – eyeasem oo: entiye awiayepaa enia? Asem ebaba debi ankasa! May God bless and protect our homeland Ghana, always. Long live freedom! Long live Ghana!
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