Have we learnt a lesson from Obama's visit?

Barack Obama

The history has already been made that the first black president of the United States of America [U.S.A] to visit West African country and to be precise Ghana was Mr. Barack Obama and his family where the sitting president of the host nation was Professor John Evans Atta Mills, his vice president Mr. John Dramani Mahama and their families.

Yes Ghana must be proud to host such a respectful person for 21 hours. A person who has not spent more than seven months in office as the president is now being looked at as role model in all over the world.

But the question we must ask ourselves is what are the lessons that we learnt from the visit of this great man of African decent who is blessed with a lot of knowledge, humility, respect for peoples rights, honest, truth, courage, fellow feeling and last but not the least leadership qualities.

Before the visit itself of the U.S. president, so many hullabaloos surrounded his coming to Ghana where some media houses tried to accuse certain politicians for plotting to cancel the visit, some demonstrators or protesters were denied the permission to hit the streets by the police and the courts weeks before the exact date of the much publicized visit.

All that happened before and after this great occasion both good and bad must be considered as lessons learnt from the occasion so that we prepare ourselves better for other important occasions such as this.

Having decided to visit the country Ghana alone gave the country much publicity in the international media describing it as a democratic country where peace, freedom of right and rule of law work. American president will not go to a country where all these things do not work.

He hit the nail right in the head where he used the country as a launch pad to fire warnings to other African countries where freedom of speech, rule of law, freedom of association, democracy, good governance and proper accountability by their leaders do not work to change for the better.

I believe he was not talking to Ghanaian leaders alone but to the whole African leaders as a son of the land when he charged them to end the tyranny, corruption and so on; and the warning or the advice or whatever we may decide to term it would not have come any better time than now.

Instead of saying stop the tyranny it should have sounded like "end the car snatching of former presidents, ministers of states.” It should have sounded like “stop harassing opposition leaders and political party opponents".

Instead of just calling for corruption, it should have sounded like "prosecute alleged corrupt persons like that of Muntaka in court instead of using security agencies to cover such deals to make room for more persons to commit serious corrupt acts to make the country poorer".

Mr. Barack Obama has come and gone. He has given direction as to how to manage our resources very well to develop our country to become a save haven for our own selves. Are we going to sit down and look at the vast natural resources and the human potentials that we have and continue to blame lack of development on ancestral slave trade?

No! We have to turn the proverb of the great Ghanaian High life Musician A.B. Crentsil saying [Aboa kwakuo Ote Duaso nanso nise apro" to wit that animal rests on a tree used for chewing sticks but has a decay teeth.

What he simply meant was that you could be sitting on gold but if you do not explore you can never be rich. Let us turn our economy round by saying yes we can by moving faster into the industrial world where technology could be easily acquired and applied to better our situation.

The country belongs to you and I; and no one can come from else where to develop it for us as the information minister proclaimed that the visit was going to improve the economy. Supposing she was serving under Mr. Iddi "Dada" Amin, former president of Uganda, she would have been fired the day she made that hollow statement. The time to move fast is now. Let us hit the road running.

Credit: Stephen A.Quaye,
Toronto-Canada.