40-year Dev’t Plan not overly ambitious – Nii Moi Thompson

“A 40-year National Development Plan for a country like Ghana is not overly ambitious as people may think, it’s made up of ten medium term plans and if we want to be a great nation then we need to think big, you cannot think small and still want to be a great and powerful nation”, the Director-General of National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) Dr. Nii Moi Thompson has said.

Dr. Nii Moi Thompson cleared the air Friday at a media forum in Accra to discuss NDPC’s regional consultation on the long term national developmental policy framework that will ensure continuity in governance.

The forum was to sensitize media practitioners on the commission’s framework and its expected benefits for the nation and to provide a platform for the participants to share their views on the policy.

Dr. Thompson in a presentation showed that most of the development challenges still facing Ghana, such as infrastructure deficits and service delivery deficiencies, are structural in nature and require a long-term view far longer than the 4 or 8 years that is currently the norm for governments.

According to him a long-term plan accommodates both the continuity required for a long-term view of national development and the change that occurs every 4 years at the ballot box and therefore becomes a win-win for all political parties and for all Ghanaians.

The Director-General pointed out that, massive implications for service delivery-housing, education, health, commerce, transportation, etc. are urgently needed to be planned to improve social-economic lives of the good people of Ghana and the time is now, not later.

“The future belongs to people and countries that are bold in terms of vision not to those who are coward in vision, the fact that you have a plan does not mean everything will happen according to the plan, just mean that you have some miles to travel so that the chances of you losing sight of what you’re doing, where you’re going will minimize. So we are satisfied with the whole 40-year plan and the regional consultations,” Dr Thompson said.

Dr. Nii Moi Thompson assured that, the commission expect to reduce its dependency on donors and anything international will be more commercial like Foreign Direct Investments or foreign companies making direct investment.

“Ghana is growing now and we are now a lower middle income country so there is a conscious decision to reduce or eliminate our dependency on foreigners and be able to stand on our own and certainly by the time Ghana turns 100 years old we should be able to this, any reliance on our foreign partners will purely be on technical grounds but not on finance”, he added.