The Nigerian example

 One of the things Nigeri­ans are well noted for is their aggressiveness in going after things they desire and I believe it is a positive attribute that we as Ghana­ians, must emulate.

We have been talking about import substitution as a means of stabilising our currency and yet not much is being done about it. The Nigerians also recognised that this is some­thing they need to tackle and what did they do?

They closed their borders to prevent rice from being brought into the country and made a conscious effort to let the population eat local­ly produced rice and it had a positive impact on their economy.

A lot of neighbouring coun­tries including Ghana com­plained about they not being given advance notice of their intended action regarding the border closure but they did not reverse their decision until the appropriate time they had set for themselves. Nigeria today has become self sufficient in rice production.

It is worthy of note that the man behind the success story of Nigeria as far as rice production is concerned, is a Ghanaian. That is one of the things that we need to ad­dress. We do not appreciate our own.

God has given us immense talents but we fail to recog­nise their worth. The whole United Nations once had its General Secretary as a Ghana­ian, in the person of late Kofi Annan.

When you go around the world, you would find Gha­naians in very unique top positions and doing very well in their various roles. They are contributing significantly to the development of those countries and yet look at their own country Ghana.

There must be something fundamentally wrong with how we deal with our own kind given how highly quali­fied Ghanaians in the diaspora are unwilling to come home to help in our developmental effort.

A serious conscious effort must be made to identify the causes and address the issues for the benefit of our great country so the Ghana Beyond Aid becomes a reality.

What I have come to real­ise is that when it comes to national development efforts, we do not need to reinvent the wheel. What countries like Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia etc. did to reach where they are today, can easily be copied and maybe tweaked a little to suit our environment and implement fir our development.

Our economic growth can easily be achieved by emulat­ing certain policies of these developed nations without necessarily doing something entirely different. Of course we need to continually inno­vate if we want to maintain our competitive edge but the policies that has contributed to the growth of the Asian Ti­gers can easily be copied and implemented.

The Ghana beyond Aid must become a national agenda if we are to make any headway in our socio-economic devel­opment because if we not have a destination in mind, we can never arrive.

We have gone to the IMF 17 times and the time has come for us to say enough is enough. We must adopt the Ghana Beyond Aid as a nation­al vision which would then compel whichever govern­ment is in place to implement policies that feeds into this vision.

This is the surest way to ensure our development as a nation and one of the policies required to achieve the vision is the implementation of the Nigerian example. Why should we still import rice, import tomatoes, import onions etc.?

By Laud Kissi-Mensah