Don't renege on your mandate - Asantehene urges World Bank

The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, has urged staff of the World Bank to carry out their duties in line with the mandate of the Bank.

He said, the World Bank was established to ensure the infrastructural and total development of developing countries and stressed the need for the Bank to adhere to it and maintain them.

"The World Bank has the responsibility to design programmes that will be best suited for the development of the world, thereby making the world peaceful in relation to development".

Otumfuo Osei Tutu made the remarks when he visited the World Bank headquarters in Washington to interact with leaders of the Bank.

He urged the World Bank to continue to collaborate with developing countries in the implementation of pragmatic policies to help accelerate economic growth.

He is also expected to deliver an address on September 13, 2019, at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly about his role in the transformation of the Asanteman and Ghana and how he combined culture and modernity in the transformation agenda in the last two decades.

The Asantehene pointed out that poverty, diseases and ignorance could be eradicated with the continuous intervention of the World Bank and underscored that human resource development was key to the proper transformation of every country and entreated world leaders to ensure that their people were well-educated to become useful to the world.

The Otumfuo Osei Tutu, who is also the Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), said the University was playing vital roles over the years to help ensure that students from Ghana and other countries were properly trained.

He called for the need for science and mathematics education to be given serious attention, indicating that those two subjects were key to the future transformation and revealed that he would lead the Ashanti Kingdom to respond to the necessary adjustments in culture and traditions in order to meet the expectations of present demands.

“Culture is not static, it is dynamic. So as time moves, you cannot stick to the old style of culture, especially when it is linked with education. As we move on, we look at various ways of developing our culture and better ways to improve the lives of our people".

“We need to look for various ways of adapting to modern needs of society, using education. We cannot live like what we did in the past. We should look for modern ways to transform mankind,” he added.