Cut dependency on developing partners—K.B. Asante

A RENOWNED diplomat, Dr K.B. Asante has stated that Ghana cannot experience a radical growth unless it cuts its dependency on developing partners.
“We are where we are because we still depend on what the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank tell us. We are not moving forward, how can we move forward when the help being given to us is in actual fact credit to make us stay put,” he said.
Dr Asante was speaking at the first in a series of lectures being organised by the All African Students Union (AASU) to mark the centenary celebration of Ghana’s first President, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah.
He said the country’s resolve to turn to developing partners anytime it needed help had “washed” the thinking of Ghanaians as they were made not to think for themselves.
“Right now, our budget is being supported by developing partners and we call that development when the help being given us is to make us dependent on them,” he emphasised, and ridiculed the idea that the country was experiencing an economic growth, when in real terms the economy had not undergone any transformation.
Dr Asante, who served in the Nkrumah-led administration from independence until its overthrow in 1966, observed that Ghana could not succeed by depending on the price of cocoa on the world market, stating that “we cannot put all our eggs in one basket”.
The Coordinator of the Third World Network, Dr Yao Graham, a Pan-African research and advocacy organisation, who spoke on the theme: “Nkrumah at 100: Lessons for African Leadership”, said one of the key lessons from Ghana’s development experience under Nkrumah was linked directly to his commitment to a Pan-African solution to the challenges of under development on the continent.
“Nkrumah’s leadership and rallying role in African affairs went beyond his vision and theorising. Importantly, it included support for national liberation movements. This support embodied a unity of his Pan-Africanism and commitment to anti-colonial independence as a necessary precondition for the continent’s unity and progress”, he stated.
Dr Graham attributed Nkrumah’s commitment to anti-colonial independence to the reason why Nkrumah stepped up with a £10 million to help newly independent Guinea from collapse after France had stripped that country of anything they could carry after it had opted for independence.
To this day, he said, Nkrumah’s detractors in Ghana still pointed to that act of solidarity as exemplary of how he wasted Ghana’s resources on matters he should have not been concerned with.
Dr Graham recounted that during the last six years of Nkrumah’s rule, Nkrumah attempted to transform the colonial economy he inherited from the British and many leaders in his generation—Nyerere in Tanzania, Kaunda in Zambia, and many others, recognised that as a primary task of post colonial economic policy.
The truth, he asserted, was that despite the claims that Nkrumah’s difficulties were because of his socialist policies, Nkrumah was in fact a good pupil of the dominant economic policies and ideas of his day as widely acclaimed by leading thinkers in the West.
“Using existing resources, Nkrumah rapidly expanded education, health and infrastructure. Many of the agro-industrial projects were in their infancy when he was overthrown. He inaugurated the Akosombo hydroeletricity dam, the centre piece of his Volta River project, which he saw as powering Ghana’s industrialisation a month before his overthrown”, he remarked.
Sadly, Dr Graham said even in the face of global crisis, many African governments were looking outward towards their “development partners” rather than exploring the opportunities for deepening regional and continental cooperation and integration.
According to Dr Graham, all those offered important opportunities for a new agenda for economic transformation in Africa, and dared African leaders who were ready to go beyond guaranteeing the sanctity of aid flows.
A lecturer at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Account (GIMPA), Dr Bright Oduro Kwarteng, who spoke on the theme: “Nkrumah, was he misunderstood?”, debunked all the allegations propagated by the Danquah-Busia tradition against Nkrumah.
“The story must be told, and we are here to tell our story”, he said, stating that before independence, Dr K.A. Busia, the Prime Minister of the Second Republic of Ghana, travelled to the United Kingdom in an attempt to convince the British government to deny Ghana its independence with the excuse that Ghana was not yet ready for independence.
Dr Kwarteng said it was true that Dr J.B. Danquah proposed the name Ghana, and Dr Busia even formed a political party with the name Ghana, but they both opposed the name when Nkrumah chose it as the country’s name after independence merely because they were not the ones declare it.
Recounting the overthrow of Dr Nkrumah, he urged the government to remove the statue of Kotoka from the Kotoka International Airport for his part in the 1966 coup.
“The CIA gave them $13 million dollars to stage the coup”, he alleged, and stated vehemently that “if you do not remove that statue, we will remove it”.
Dr Kwarteng, however, suggested that “Ghana must invest in compulsory education and primary healthcare, exemplary of Nkrumah’s administration, adding that “you cannot have the private sector as the engine of growth, unless you have an efficient public sector”.
“We need to also invest in the public sector to make the private sector flourish. Our planning for the future education must stand tall in the list of priorities. We need to have an educational system that is home grown”, he stressed.