Dear Minister,
For those who understand that our nation’s long-term prosperity, hinges largely on the transformation of rural Ghana, your appointment to the key local government and rural development portfolio, couldn’t have come at a more propitious time – and was a stroke of genius on the part of the appointing authority. Your experience as a regional minister, means that you bring to your new job, a clear understanding of the pivotal role played by the District Assemblies, in the grand scheme of things, in Ghana’s economic development – and appreciate the vital need to move rapidly towards a situation of stability and sustainability, in the matter of their overall funding.
To that end, I urge you to talk to the Indian High Commission as soon as practicable, with a view to seeking an Indian government grant, which will enable the Indian renewable energy company, Husk Power Systems (HPS), to partner all the District Assemblies in Ghana, to put up and operate biomass power generating plants, in public private partnership (PPP) joint ventures. Apart from securing a permanent and sustainable revenue-stream source that way, from the cash generated by selling excess power to the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), producing their own power will also enable the District Assemblies to immediately free up much-needed resources, previously committed to paying for electricity consumption, for development at the grass-roots level.
Additionally, providing subsidized power to communities not yet connected to the national grid, as well as subsiding the power consumed by communities in their districts, which are already connected to the national grid (something that can easily be worked out when selling excess power to the ECG!), will dramatically improve rural living standards, in all the areas administered by District Assemblies.
There will be a spurt of economic activity, as a cornucopia of micro-enterprises – made possible by the provision of cheap power - spring up all over the Ghanaian countryside. It will also create an agricultural-sector supply chain, which will create jobs for hundreds of thousands of young people nationwide. An immediate example that comes to mind, being agricultural cooperatives made up of young farmers using the food and agricultural ministry’s block-farming model, to earn decent regular income, utilizing degraded land to grow feed stock to sell to the biomass power plants.
Above all, generating power that they sell an excess of, to the ECG, for cash, will free the District Assemblies from the straight-jacket tyranny, which their dependence on the District Assemblies’ Common Fund represents. Minister, there is no question that the success or failure of the Mills regime, will depend largely on what you are able to achieve in the relatively short space of time left for your National Democratic Congress (NDC) regime, led by the most honest and selfless leader Ghana has had, thus far, since the overthrow of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in February 1966, President Mills.
The appointment of your erstwhile colleague, the Hon. Baba Jamal, who served as your deputy in your previous portfolio as eastern regional minister, to the information ministry as one of that ministry’s two deputy ministers, is also timely and very helpful. For, more than most politicians in Ghana today, he knows just how much has already been achieved by the Mills administration, since it came to power in January 2009. Keenly aware that your regime in effect inherited a ruined national economy, amounting to a poisoned chalice, it must rile with both of you that so many ordinary Ghanaians are still unaware of the many miracles achieved countrywide, by the present regime.
In my humble view, what is even more remarkable, is the sheer breadth of the scale of what has been achieved across the country, in a relatively short span of time, despite the near-insurmountable economic difficulties your regime initially faced.
Every sincere and fair-minded Ghanaian with even a modicum of understanding of the subject of economics, will acknowledge the parlous nature of the Ghanaian economy, at the time your government came into office, and the enormity of the challenge that re-balancing public finances under those circumstances entailed.
It is to its eternal credit that despite those challenges, the NDC government has succeeded in stabilizing the economy – and has now put Ghana on a path of sustained growth. It is ironic that those responsible for creating those selfsame challenges , have the gall to accuse your regime of failing to fix the economy, when your administration is actually already doing so, steadily and methodically.
What discerning and fair-minded Ghanaian (as opposed to the “My-party-my-tribe-right-or-wrong” myrmidon type of Ghanaian citizen, whose blinkered support for political parties and politicians, is slowly destroying our democracy!), does not know that the economy was more or less destroyed by the NPP’s own recklessness in accumulating, and leaving behind, a huge mountain of debt, on top of their irresponsible and destructive profligacy – driven by unparalleled profiteering (never once witnessed in Ghana before!) by their regime’s cronies in the Ghanaian business world, and occasioned by unfathomable greed, endless nepotism, and widespread corruption?
(Incidentally, President Mils must be a saint to extend a hand of friendship to the very individual who oversaw, with ruthless efficiency, the golden age of business for NPP crony-capitalist profiteers.
Was it not their gargantuan rip-offs, juicy deal after juicy deal, (often made possible by leveraging top-level insider-information!), which ultimately brought Ghana to its knees, at just around the time the selfsame Mr. Kufuor’s tenure as president of Ghana, mercifully came to an end, in January 2009?
What an odd gesture from President Mills, and what a pity, too. Alas, despite the smiles and bonhomie at their Osu Castle meeting, it is a fact that Kufuor & Co. cannot ever possibly wish either President Mills or his NDC regime well, in their hearts of hearts. Politicians can certainly be strange beings sometimes – why the sudden eagerness to please such completely ruthless political opponents, I ask? But I digress!)
Minister, it is unforgivable that the geniuses at the information ministry have allowed the many solid achievements of the NDC government to be overlooked by so many in our country – because they chose to waste precious time, and dissipate hapless taxpayers’ money in the process, waging a fruitless and pointless propaganda war. Their shortsightedness and lack of imagination, has resulted in a picture in the mind’s eye of the average Ghanaian, which does not in any way corresponded with the facts of positive achievement galore, on the ground nationwide.
Just what was the point in following the NPP’s dreadful and anti-democratic example, of buying off sections of the media, and individual journalists, I ask? Was the most sensible thing to do in an era of austerity and scarce resources, not to rather concentrate on resourcing the all-important Information Services Department (ISD)?
In the 21st century ICT age, surely, it ought to have dawned on even those geniuses, that if the ISD were well-resourced with affordable cutting-edge mobile broadband technology, it would make it the perfect value-for-money state entity for gathering information nationwide, about the government’s achievements: getting real-time local reaction to the impact of such new development on the quality of life at the grass-roots level, and disseminating same instantaneously, nationwide and globally?
As a result of a lack of creativity in their thinking, as well as their irritating complacency, today, the picture etched deeply in the sub-conscious of most ordinary Ghanaians, is one of a non-performing administration, besieged on all sides, and apparently bereft of ideas – the outcome of the NPP’s big-lie-narrative strategy, brilliantly summed up in that magical regime-changing propaganda word-of-mass-destruction, “Enkoyie”.
Luckily, discerning and fair-minded Ghanaians know that it is a completely erroneous and unfair picture of the record of the Mills administration, thus far: a false picture painted mostly by unprincipled and mercenary journalists to benefit their equally unprincipled the-end-justifies-the-means NPP paymasters.
So get to work, and act quickly Minister, to get the processes underway, which will lead to the District Assemblies using the PPP model to enter into joint-venture partnerships with HPS, to build renewable biomass power plants nationwide, to generate sustainable income for district-level development, and create much-needed wealth in rural Ghana; with affordable renewable energy as the foundation and catalyst, for grass-roots wealth creation.
Once ordinary Ghanaians are made to understand clearly the overall impact on rural Ghana, of such PPP’s when they are eventually completed, and can see concrete evidence of such work-in-progress District Assembly projects on the ground, across the nation, it will be hard-to-ignore tangible evidence, which will definitely help negate much of the NPP’s Enkoyie propaganda. I wish you well in the task before you – and Godspeed in its accomplishment, too!
Best wishes,
Kofi Thompson.
Tel (powered by Tigo – the one mobile phone network in Ghana that actually works!): + 233 (0) 27 745 3109.
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