Going forward into President Mills' year of action, 2011, Ghana's younger generation must ensure that those old fogies, who have dominated their country for so long, and have dissipated the country's wealth over the years, are not allowed to misuse the oil and natural gas revenues too. It is crucial that young Ghanaians move away from the destructive partisanship that the "My-party-my-tribe-right-or-wrong" type of blinkered politics, represents. It is slowly destroying Ghanaian democracy. They must look next door to the tragedy now playing out in the Ivory Coast, to see where that kind of narrow-mindedness leads. They must focus instead, on demanding that those who rule Ghana, at any given point in time, going forward, transform the nation into an African equivalent of the egalitarian societies of Scandinavia.
They must not allow Ghana's educated urban elite to end up doing what Nigeria's kleptocratic elite has done: purloin that nation's oil wealth for themselves. Above all, they must force Ghana's ruling elite to end the pure nonsense on bamboo stilts self-serving policies, which enable politically well-connected individuals fronting for some of our rulers, to end up getting blocs in oil-fields, for simply leading oil companies here. Is it not the norm that in business deals globally, sometimes locals get "sweat equity" by being given stakes in foreign companies they assist: to compensate them in lieu of cash payments upfront? Who ever heard of such individuals being handed "market share" on a silver platter, in the sector of the economy those entities operate in? Yet, somehow that is precisely the unthinkable that has occurred in our oil and natural gas industries: thanks to the perfidy of self-seeking and greedy politicians.
Amongst other things, young Ghanaians must demand that their homeland Ghana, becomes a nation in which well-built and well-designed affordable public-sector housing, is available nationwide, to all hardworking citizens who need accommodation; railway lines traverse the entire country, thus enabling ordinary Ghanaians to travel to all the regional capitals, by train, whenever they so wish; lack of finance to fund their education becomes a thing of the past, and that coming from a financially-challenged background never again prevents any young person with the aptitude to do so, to study up to tertiary level: because state funding for educating the academically-gifted is available to all who need it.
That is the kind of Ghana Nkrumah planned when he was fighting for an independent nation for his people - and that is precisely the kind of Ghana that young Ghanaians must insist today's Ghana is turned into by their nation's political class: utilizing the country's oil and natural gas revenues. They must never allow a powerful few with greedy ambitions to hijack that wealth for themselves, their family clans, and their cronies. One hopes that they saw and abhored the beginnings of that journey to hell, Nigerian-style, during the Kufour-era: and will never again allow private individuals to be given blocs in oil fields, from which revenues that could improve the lives of all Ghanaians, end up just enriching a few politically well-connected individuals. Henceforth they must insist that if individuals driven by unfathomable greed want to own blocs in Ghana's oil-fields, they must stump up the cash for it. They must jealously guard what in effect are windfall profits, from a finite natural resource, hugely risky, environmentally, to extract. A word to the wise...
Tel (powered by Tigo the one mobile phone network in Ghana that actually works!)+ 233 (0) 27 745 3109.
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