It is a positive development that the New Patriotic Party's (NPP) Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia has finally come out with a 10-point plan to end youth unemployment and to spur economic growth.
The NPP must be congratulated for finally attempting to change the nature of its election campaign so positively.
Despite his brave attempt to inspire the students he addressed at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in Kumasi, alas, like many of the members of our educated urban elites, Dr. Bawumia showed that he is not an original thinker.
With the greatest respect, when it comes down to it, he is nothing more than just yet another "flash-in-the-pan brilliant chew-and-pour educated Ghanaian," to quote an old acquaintance of mine. Pity.
Unsurprisingly, there was an unfortunate lack of creativity, in the plan he outlined to the KNUST audience of spell-bound students that he addressed, to stimulate growth and jobs in the real economy - which will actually impact lives positively. Versions of the policies mentioned in his 10-point plan have been implemented by various regimes since the 4th Republic came into being, with very little impact on the lives of ordinary people, alas.
He mentions the cost to the economy of corruption, for example - yet strangely does not commit to the one thing that will stop high-level corruption in its tracks in the real world here: all political appointees (from the president down to the last district chief executive) and their spouses publicly publishing their assets immediately before and after their tenures in office.
Ditto political parties publicly publishing their sources of funding. Young educated Ghanaians must take note of that when considering who to vote for in November. Without that gesture of transparency, Ghana is going nowhere, fast, in its economic development after the elections.
He also talked about expanding the mortgage industry. Perhaps that is a good thing in a sense - for young people in some well-managed developed world economies, that is. However, in the real world, across our homeland Ghana, only high earners can take on mortgages comfortably - and there are not that many young high earners in Ghana as it happens, unfortunately.
A more creative policy, for example - in a nation with huge disparities in wealth - will be to rather ring-fence revenues from the National Lotteries Authority - and use that to build well-designed and well-built affordable two and three-bedroomed flats, in new green-designed communities through public private partnerships (PPP), with reputable local real estate developers, and stipulate that rent will be used as installment payments to acquire the flats over a period of twenty years.
Will that not give low-income youth from Nima, and other deprived urban communities from the bottom strata of Ghanaian society, the opportunity to own their own well-designed and well-built accommodation, in new green neighbourhoods - simply by buying lottery tickets, and, to ensure fairness in their allocation, qualifying for one through random selection by public computer draws?
That is creative policy-making in the real economy impacting actual lives positively.
Incidentally, why do the Bawumias (and other young politicians from across the spectrum) not talk to the California-based Sama Group's Ms. Leila Janah - about partnering the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) to create well-paid digital jobs for unemployable youth in the Zongos and rural Ghana?
Ditto using her group's Laxmi cosmetic business to partner shea butter-producing women's groups in the three northern regions, such as Cynbeth, run by Ms. Cynthia Kampoe, whose value-chain provides scholarships for over 300 children?
Leila Janah once taught in a village school in Ghana for a year whiles at high school. And, after graduating from Harvard University - where she did a course in African Development Studies - she worked as a consultant at Kazenbach. She later left to work with the World Bank.
Her desire to help alleviate global poverty, led to her resignation from the World Bank, to set up SamaSource, to leverage her Silicon Valley contacts to find well-paid digital work for poor slum dwellers in Kenya and elsewhere. A win-win PPP between the YEA and her Sama Group could find relatively well-paid work for tens of thousands of disadvantaged youth in both rural and urban Ghana.
Is that not a more creative approach than current and past government poverty alleviation schemes - such as the NPP's proposed Zongo Development Fund - which at the end of the day, only allow our vampire-elites to exploit the poor?
What is the point of pouring taxpayers' cash down the financial equivalent of blackholes that the many crony-capitalist-benefiting-poverty-alleviation-schemes represent - that mostly only end up enriching a few super-wealthy individuals who fund the NDC/NPP duopoly through kickbacks from the vast profits milked from those schemes, I ask?
And in case Bawumia forgets, President Kufuor's regime apparently sunk U.S.$30 million into the National Identification Authority in 2006 - years after some of us had been persistently asking for one for our nation in our writing: if as a people we were serious about modernising our nation. Did he hear the rumour that that U.S.$30 million alledgedly disappeared into the ether, one wonders?
If he was a more creative thinker would he not already have spoken to Facebook, by now, for example, about collaborating with Ghana in a PPP to fund the creation of a national ID system using its DeepFace artificial intelligence facial recognition system, which would connect all state agencies and entities with one another and be accessible to all of them too - and informed his KNUST audience about it?
It will be a win-win PPP - as Ghana would gain a robust cutting-edge national ID system, without having to pay upfront for it, whiles Facebook gains the experience for a new stand-alone global business, providing national ID systems, for developing nations.
Speaking as someone from a land-owning cocoa farming background, with respect, the only way politicians in Ghana can actually improve agricultural production in the real world, is to make the entirety of farming value-chains across all sectors - not just that of the cocoa sector - tax-free businesses.
Hopefully, the Dr. Bawumias will revise their notes in that regard. The same must be done for the renewable energy sector too - if we are to democratise energy generation in Ghana by expanding the renewable energy sector.
And the only way to release the boundless energies and incredible talents of young Ghanaians, and create an entrepreneurial culture to power a business revolution that will create jobs galore in our country, and make our nation a prosperous one - paradoxically - is to abolish personal income tax, and make Ghana the nation with Africa's lowest corporate tax rates. Ditto the African nation with the continent's lowest interest rates for bank lending.
What that will do, is to immediately attract hundreds of thousands of high net worth individuals and entrepreneurs from around the world, to come and establish residence here, and live here for part of the year at least.
And when they do, they will either buy properties here or rent them, set up sundry businesses, including manufacturing industries, and invest in other areas of the national economy. All that will create tens of thousands of jobs for young people in Ghana.
Since Dr. Bawumia apparently loves reading, this blog humbly recommends that he reads the book entitled: "Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken, And How We Can Fix It" - by Positive Money, the UK advocacy group that wants to democratise the issuing of money.
Let Bawumia's many young admirers do so too - by looking up the Positive Money website. They should sign up to join the International Movement for Monetary Reform - and set up local chapters in all the university campuses across the nation.
If they browse the Positive Money website, they will see why the Dr. Bawumias are part of the problem humankind faces - not part of the solution to the myraid of problems of modern life in a globalised world resulting from bad monetary policies by central banks.
Incidentally, where were the Bawumias when some of us were in the trenches in the nineties demanding debt relief for poor African nations and a reform of the international monetary system - before that relentless pressure led to the highly indebted poor countries initiative that gave the Kufuor regime the breathing space we predicted debt relief would bring to spur growth in poor African nations: whose very lifeblood was being sucked out of them by Shylock-debt-servicing?
Dr Bawumia is a beguiling political figure admired by many educated young Ghanaians - but what Ghana actually needs is a Sir Richard Branson-type of charismstic, swashbuckling serial entrepreneur, who has been hugely successful at creating wealth and jobs.
If the leaders of all the Nkrumahist parties finally see the light, and merge their parties with the Convention People's Party, and select a world-class individual and successful serial entrepreneur like Dr. Paa Kwesi Nduom, as the party's presidential candidate, that indeed will be the "real deal" for Mother Ghana.
Educated young Ghanaians, who are indepedent-minded thinkers, must compare Nduom and Bawumia (since hypothetically he might succeed a President Akufo-Addo before the end of his tenure) in a head-to-head contest to see who has a stellar track-record of job creation and wealth accumulation through honest hard work and innovative leadership.
In that regard, Nduom dwarfs all Ghana's politicians - including President Mahama and the NPP's Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo. He is the "real deal" indeed for Ghana's future after the November elections.
Be that as it may, one hopes that Dr. Bawumia has finally kick-started an election campaign based on issues of concern to ordinary people - and that Ghanaian politicians across the spectrum will now end their daft politics of endless propaganda, trading insults and the demonising of political opponents.
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