Okudzeto-Ablakwa Cannot Even Cut and Paste!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

It is quite tempting to side with Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa’s contention about Ghana requiring a homegrown economic development plan, rather than seeking to emulate the so-called BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China (See “Okudzeto: Nana Addo’s Cut-and-Paste 10-Year Plan is Empty, Visionless” (MyJoyOnline.com 3/16/11).

The fact of the matter, however, is that in our post-industrial cybernetic world, one does not need to either proverbially and/or literally reinvent the wheel. The models are there for their ready selection and usage as and when deemed appropriate, of course; and this is exactly what Nana Akufo-Addo’s 10-year Development Plan is essentially about.

On another all-too-basic level, however, it is disturbingly laughable for Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa, whose National Democratic Congress’ “vision” for Ghana’s development largely entails the reckless ceding of billions of dollars’ worth of building contracts to South Korea’s STX, to be smugly lecturing Ghanaians about what constitutes an ideal, constructive and visionary development agenda for the country.

Maybe somebody ought to repeat it, once more, for this evidently tone-deaf Deputy Information Minister that the slain Gen. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong (1972-1977) used Ghanaian architects and “home-nurtured” builders of the State Construction Corporation (SCC) to build the Dansoman Estate-Housing Complex. At the time, Dansoman was the single largest planned urban settlement of its kind in the ECOWAS sub-region.

And so if he really wants to learn something, Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa had better get it underneath his skull that, strictly speaking, nobody appreciates homegrown development better than the very Ghanaian citizens he so cavalierly presumes to talk down to. In sum, if Ghanaians were to reject the AKUFO-ADDO DEVELOPMENT PLAN, it would scarcely be for the fact that a pathologically cynical Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa finds no amusement in the same.

Really, the fact of the matter is that even Kwame Nkrumah’s much-touted 7-Year Development Plan was lifted hook, line and sinker from the erstwhile Soviet Union. And so what is all this vacuous talk about “a visionary development agenda that is homegrown”? Let Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa point to a single homegrown development plan offered Ghanaians by the Mills-Mahama government, before the former can credibly impugn either the feasibility and/or validity of the AKUFO-ADDO DEVELOPMENT PLAN.

Looking thus far at the NDC government’s at once extractive and export-oriented attitude towards the development of Ghana’s fledgling oil industry, it becomes frightfully clear that Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa and his ilk prefer to continue with the proto-colonialist and much-discredited Guggisberg Economic Development Plan. And it is this patently regressive development agenda of the ruling National Democratic Congress that Ghanaian voters ought to roundly and unreservedly reject come Election 2012!

Indeed, what we ought to be discussing, right now, as a nation of progressive citizens and thinkers, is the kind and level of industrial and technological development that Ghana needs to doggedly pursue, and not whether this or that aspect of somebody’s development agenda has been borrowed from any of the so-called BRIC nations.

Anyway, what Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa conveniently and deviously failed to tell the Tertiary Educational Institutions Network (TEIN) wing of the National Democratic Congress, is the fact that the economic agenda which has engendered the great success stories of the BRIC nations – namely, Brazil, Russia, India and China – is the same pro-industrial capitalist agenda that has been fervidly promoted and inexorably pursued by the Danquah-Busia-Dombo group since at least 1948, even before Mr. Kwame Nkrumah and his so-called Convention People’s Party (CPP) established their pseudo-socialist stranglehold on the Ghanaian political landscape!

And so, really, for those of us who have always been on the right side of the visionary economic development agenda of the BRIC nations, and before that those of the United States and Western Europe, it is almost midnight on Creation’s day, as legendary Nigerian novelist Professor Chinua Achene would say. In other words, for those of us whose ideological patriarchs have always stood for a free-market development agenda, it comes as hardly any surprise that both Russia and China would today be comfortably ranked among the giants of industrial capitalist economies. Needless to say, it is only a matter of time before Cuba joins this progressive pack.

Ultimately, what is both tragic and pathetic is the fact that the diligent and unsuspecting Ghanaian voter should be criminally hoodwinked into electing a government most of whose key operatives do not even possess the basic, albeit quite creative, skill of cutting and pasting some of the best and most constructive and exemplary modular aspects of the BRIC economic agenda.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and author of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ###