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In the 1800’s when western education was yet to take root in the country, and centralized system of formal governance was in it’s infancy, the noble citizens of the then Ghana were able to develop their various towns with less assistance from the central government and traditional leaders.
Ghanaians then saw nation building as a sheer responsibility of both authorities and the ordinary citizens. With their cutlass they created roads and paths in bushy areas, from skills they acquired from ancestors they employed themselves in the art of kente weaving, cultivation of vast lands , thus were able to earn a living.
However, after 60 years of political freedom and a wide spread of knowledge in both technology and what I would refer to as book knowledge, there have been massive creation of unemployed associations, whose members are mostly the educated and the elites in the country.
They claim to have formed such irrelevant associations to present the plights and needs of the unemployed to the government. Like every association, these unemployed associations, pay dues, organize end of year parties, gather funds to elect new leaders into office on yearly basis and hold meetings to discuss new tactics of petitioning the government.
This new turn of event is disturbing and should be seen as a threat to the development of the nation as citizens who are to initiate projects for nation growth meet occasionally as unemployed to deliberate on how to be feed by government but not how to change their statues from Unemployed to employed, and entrepreneurs.
Are we to believe members of such associations have no handy skills, is it to say none can make pastries, venture into crop farming or animal husbandry? Are dues paid by members of such associations too small to start simple firms such as a printing press, fruit juice industries, fast food joints and many more? Instead they mishandle such funds prodigally.
It is sad how the same members of such unemployed association compare the country and her leaders to sister countries and label government and its official as incompetent. Though our leaders are not perfect, Ghanaians must realize that, nation building and development does not depend solely on government but the whole of the country’s citizenry.
It is amazing to notice that the world’s largest economy, the United States of America(USA) has 91% of her workers in the private sector and out of the 27 million business in the USA, three-quarters of them is of the private sector. It is no wonder that in June, 2017, the country reported an unemployment rate of 4.4%.
The situation is no different from China. In 1978, State owned enterprises contributed 75% to China’s economic growth, today it contributes only 25% to the economy with the rest coming from the private sector.
The private sector have become the main source of economic growth, the sole source of increasing employment, and the major contributor to China’s growing and now large role as a global trader. All these are empirical evidences that if a country is to be economically sound and developed, it would depend on the vision of her citizen but not the total reliance on government and the formation of ridiculous groups.
Elliot Ayertey Nuertey nuerteyelliot@yahoo.com
