Commonwealth@60: Spio-Garbrah’s lecture

Former Minister for Trade and Industry, Mr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah has made a call to old vandals to use their networks and the spirit of vandalism to help move the nation’s agenda for economic and financial independence forward.

Giving a lecture at the Commonwealth Hall of the University of Ghana, Mr Spio-Garbrah said vandalism is not all negative as people make it look. He says values such as excellence, essence of brotherhood, freedom, courage, leadership, sense of competitiveness, creativity and many others are very important to vandals.

He indicated that Vandals have made “enormous contributions to Ghana, Africa and the world” and one of such contributions is the leadership role they took in the introduction of National Service Scheme when they demanded for 6 months of military training and 6 months of national service.

Mr Spio-Garbrah said, “eventually the government accepted the idea of national service but removed the military training part of it because they did not want to have us know how to manage and use weapons… so the current national service scheme is bit of extortion of what we as vandals fought for”.

The former Minister also made a call to old vandals to help prepare students for the ‘real’ world as their teachers in school cannot share with them experiences in other sectors since the teachers don’t have experience from other sectors.

“If the knowledge that is outside is not coming into the classroom then there is a disparity,” he noted.

He additionally indicated that there should be “relevant content to the specific developmental needs of Ghana and Africa” in the new curricular being developed for JHS, SHS and Universities.