Consultant calls for a community development policy

Kumasi, April 28, GNA - A Development Planner on Tuesday appealed to the government to task the National Development Planning Commission to develop policy that would serve as a blueprint for the development of resource endowed communities.

Mr Nyaaba-Aweeba Azongo said this would help address the visible levels of deprivation in mining and other natural resource endowed communities.

He was speaking to the Ghana News Agency in an interview in Kumasi in reaction to President Mills' expression of concern over the levels of deprivation in mining communities. Mr Azongo said the plight of those communities represented an indictment on the nation's development planning policy machinery rather than on the mining industries.

He said the development of such a policy had become even more important in view of the discovery of oil in commercial quantities in the country since that would help prevent possible conflicts. Mr Azongo, who is also the Consultant to the Suame Magazine Industrial Development Organisation (SMIDO), pointed out that it was not the primary responsibility of mining companies to alleviate the suffering of people in resource endowed communities.

"The missing link was the absence of a national special resource-endowed community development planning policy to determine the shape of corporate mining, government and community stakeholder engagement through a collective enterprise development approach". He commended the President for showing such concern for mining communities but said; "Tasking the mining companies to do more to alleviate the suffering of the broad masses of the people in the mining communities only exposed the lack of a coherent special policy for the development of such communities.

Mr Azongo indicated that to subsume the development of special resource endowed communities under the social responsibility of corporate parties went against the basic tenets of development policy planning.

He said it was pathetic that the fate of special resource endowed communities in Ghana and Africa as a whole had been reduced to a simple exercise of corporate relief charity in the name of social corporate responsibility.

He cautioned that such continuous policy neglect and relegation of these communities to corporate parties' social responsibility was a recipe for conflicts.

Mr Azongo said the absence of an appropriate policy had made such communities to be conflict prone and that it was about time the nation took action to establish a case for the rest of Africa. He described social corporate responsibility as a "mere fifth wheel in the coach of development to be relied upon for the development of these special resource endowed communities".