Business News of 2012-10-17

Invest $1bn in entrepreneurship- Dr. Kofi Amoah

Investment guru Dr. Kofi Amoah has called on Ghana’s presidential candidates to commit to a billion dollar entrepreneurship fund, arguing that a host of innovative young minds in Ghana are ready to transform the country but lack the capital to do so.

Ghana’s main economic shortcoming, he said, is that homegrown industries have failed to reap the full benefits of the nation’s most valuable resources, people and land.

Speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show Wednesday, he offered a series of prescriptions for economic growth in Ghana.

To boost efficiency in land use, he proposed a tax on idle land that would incentivize landowners to make their property productive. While individuals hold the titles to these lands, Dr. Amoah believes that land is the key to development, which he considers the birthright of every Ghanaian.

He said that improvements to the techniques and technologies used in farming and food distribution could dramatically increase crop yields and that each region must specialize its agricultural production, focusing on crops that thrive in local soil. In tandem with these initiatives, he appealed to the government to establish factories in each region to process and can the resulting crop surpluses for domestic consumption and export.

He explained that these factories would create jobs across the social spectrum, for highly educated graduates and less educated laborers alike, and that as these workers earn more money, their spending would further fortify the economy.

On the theme of import dependence, Dr. Amoah complained that each year, Ghanaians spend millions of dollars importing goods that could easily be produced domestically to save money and create local jobs.

Ghana could become the breadbasket of West Africa, he said, if Ghanaians follow his recommendations to reduce imports and increase agricultural production and not the basket case of import dependent country that it currently is.

Speaking of the government’s role in development, he said that the government should act as a catalyst for growth by prioritizing its infrastructure investment. The government is unlikely to see returns on investments in housing, he said, whereas the entrepreneurship programme that he suggested would more than pay for itself because it is an investment in human ingenuity.

Similarly, international development finance is available, but it must be applied in profitable ways so as to increase lender confidence in Ghana.

In his view, two other major impediments to growth are incompetence in government and a national mentality in need of adjustment.

He said that some government officials whose performance is crucial to development are in fact not qualified to fill their positions and that such individuals hold the country back.

His message to the people was that dignity and civilization come from within, and if Ghanaians consciously abandon harmful or self-defeating practices such as serving food near open gutters, there will be no bounds to Ghana’s growth.