SADA Needs To Be Matched With FADA

Now that the Osafo-Maafo secret audiotape recording has become public knowledge, calculated contretemps and all, it is about time we initiated a conversation on national development across the board. First of all, we need to promptly discard this perennial myth about there being any such phenomenon as a gaping development gap between the two major geographical halves of Ghana, namely, the North and the South. One only needs to hear the nerve-grating clamor of those members of the Western Regional House of Chiefs for 10-percent of all proceeds from the nation's oil revenue to fully appreciate the fact that like the North, development is not evenly spread across the South.

What the foregoing means is that any policy initiative that is predicated on the myth of northern underdevelopment, relative to its southern counterpart, is just what the term implies, a myth, a patent practical myth. Indeed, even as I write, the Volta chiefs are are also clamoring for adequate access to development resources from the central government. Which makes one wonder why the inhabitants and citizens of that region continue to vote enmasse for the Rawlings-minted and Anlo-Ewe-dominated National Democratic Congress (NDC), if Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, a native son of Anlo, did so little for the Volta Region during the two protracted decades that he staddled our national political landscape as a maximum ruler.

Needless to say, what Ghana needs presently is a comprehensive national development program, and not one that is falsely premised on one half of the country's being criminally over-developed and overly privileged at the damnable expense of the other, that is deemed to be equally criminally underdeveloped and unacceptably deprived. The truth of the matter is that no matter how one views it, Ghana is a veritable Third World country whose general development index leaves much to be desired. There may be pockets of posh and/or flashy neighborhoods here and there but as a country, we are darn well behind real modernity.

Which is why the current rage sheepishly regards the very basic question of how to get electric-power supply around the clock. In short, a nation beset by "Dumsor" is unarguably a nation under steady developmental regression. Which is why Dr. Matthew Opoku-Prempeh's call for the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress to make SADA - the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority - a national agenda cannot be taken lightly (See "SADA Would Only Succeed As A National Project - NPP-MP" Ghana News Agency / Ghanaweb.com 2/28/15).

At any rate, what has, so far, made SADA the white elephant that it indubitably is, and I have written on this subject in the recent past, is the decision by President John Dramani Mahama to make this otherwise well-intentioned and even laudable venture a fraudulent pretext for a few close associates of His Excellency to, literally, take the Ghanaian taxpayer to the cleaners. And, of course, the fact that almost each and every one of these filthy rich scammers is of northern birth or heritage, makes this geographically exclsive project all the more invidious, to speak much less about the downright criminal.

Ultimately, in order to bring about justice, a FADA project needs to be immediately established by Ghana's Parliament and set to work in much the same way as its SADA counterpart, except that FADA - the Forest Accelerated Development Authority - will select its administrators and contractors purely on the basis of merit. Indeed, it can hardly be gainsaid that when it comes to development thinking, relatively speaking, that is, our northern brothers and sisters still have a thing or two to learn from their southern kinsfolk and compatriots.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 28, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]