Let’s prioritise private sector development – Former President Kufuor
A former President, John Agyekum Kufuor, has called for a renewed national commitment to private sector development particularly Public-Private Partnership (PPP) to help facilitate the development of the country.
A renewed national commitment to private sector development focused on PPP, he emphasised, was necessary because “prosperity and growth of society all happen on the backs of entrepreneurship and work”.
The former President made the remark in Accra yesterday during a dialogue organised by the Design Technology Institute (DTI) to discuss the future of work.
The former President, who was the Guest of Honour said under his tenure, the private sector was prioritised and it was an engine of growth which gave the necessary incentives for private sector to thrive.
The former president said his core belief in entrepreneurship could be traced his upbringing in Kumasi in 1938.
Born into a family involved in cocoa and rubber farming, he recalled how the Gold Coast with a population of about 5 million in the 1940s became the world’s leading cocoa producer.
“It wasn’t the government as such that farmed, but produced cocoa that made this little country the number one producer in the whole world. The average farmer was not doing bigger than, say, five acres but they did it because they sensed the profitability of their efforts,” he said.
He noted that his uncle was among the private local buyers who exported beans to Europe and later helped found the Cocoa Marketing Board in 1947.
Mr Kufuor said that at independence in 1957, Gold Coast’s per capita income was comparable to or better than countries like Malaysia and South Korea.
He noted that post-independence ideologies led to “state capture,” where the state sought to do everything.
For her part, the Founder and President of DTI, Mrs Constance Elizabeth Swaniker, said as they celebrated their senior visionaries and deliberated together on the future of Ghana’s workforce, they had to ask themselves honestly what they owed the next generation and what they were committing to.
She recalled that Dr James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey, an intellectual, missionary, and teacher, had declared that the surest way to keep a people down was to deprive them of education,and was also quoted as saying that nothing but the best was good enough for Africa.
The founder noted that in 1957, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah had made the call that what other countries had taken 300 years or more to achieve, a once dependent territory must try to accomplish in a generation if it was to survive.
“The call for Ghana s industrialisation did not begin with DTI but it echoes across generations. Nkrumah built the Akosombo Dam, founded universities, launched industrialisation plans, and declared that Ghana must be not only politically free but also economically capable,’’ he stated.
BY AGNES OWUSU AND NELLY QUARCOOPOME
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