WHAT EXACTLY DO WE WANT TO MANUFACTURE?

I have for a while been wondering whether the Ghanaian "ECONOMISTS" making the staunch, unrelenting argument that for Ghana to become prosperous it needs create a large manufacturing industry are being realistic or just pouring what they read from some old text books.

Comparing our 3 major sectors, the Agric and Industry sectors have received more government support cumulatively than Services, over the last 10 or so years yet over that same period, the Service industry has (as a lone orphan) overtaken the Agric and industry sectors in its contribution to GDP – yet we don’t stop to ask why the shift and how it can be encouraged, rather, we want to swim against the tides.

Agric 40% (2006): 22% (2014)
Industry 28% (2006): 28% (2014)
Services 32% (2006): 50% (2014)
We are struggling with electricity, water, pollution management and ridding corruption and bureaucratic drags at our ports and harbours. Ghana's labour to value ratio according to the World Banks 2015 rankings is 0.3 – which means for every $1 paid to a Ghanaian employee, s/he adds a value of $3 to the organisation. Whereas in places like Malaysia, Botswana, Singapore, Rwanda and Taiwan, it ranges from 0.2 – 0.1, which means for every $1 paid to their industry staff, they add a value of $5 - $10 to their organisations.

Mind you the world has graduated from a mass industrial age to a more bespoke and virtual knowledge era - solutions are being created from thin air and sold in thin air - "virtual space"; oil and steel prices that used to give indication of global "industry and manufacturing" trends respectively are now sold for pennies. Christ, do we not see these obvious disruptive trends?

Populations that used to indicate the size of consumers will soon no more be measured by the number of human beings but by concentration or its lack, of bespoke technologies.

So, is it that we are embracing this whole MANUFACTURING ARGUMENT by default because we cannot think outside the box to create entirely new sectors based on our endowments from scratch???

Somebody please tell me, what really is the HARD TRUTH supporting the argument for Ghana to go into MASS MANUFACTURING?