CPP Says Africa Needs Dynamic Leaders To Solve Challenges

The Convention Peoples' Party (CPP) has said Africa needs dynamic and not speech-making leaders and therefore called on African governments to roll their sleeves, get down to business, for which they were voted into power.

'Most African governments have transformed leadership into speech-making platforms, organising and attending conferences while the real work for the social-economic development remains undone.

'We need a paradigm shift in the African governance architecture, where leadership rolls-up their sleeves and descend from their ivory towers and join the masses for rapid transformation,' Professor Edmund Nminyem Delle, Chairman of the CPP told the Ghana News Agency in an interview in Accra.

Prof Delle who is also the leader of the CPP noted that most African governments have reduced governance into euphoria and ceremonial mechanism with show of opulence and political authority to the disadvantage of the ordinary citizen.

The CPP Chairman therefore called on civil society actors, traditional and religious leaders, think tanks, the media as well as political parties, especially opposition party establishment to constantly play active watchdog roles in the interest of the people.

He said there was the urgent need for African leadership to engage in strategic thinking and planning to prepare the population for emerging and future challenges.

The CPP Chairman said in contemporary complex societies, institutions that made the population survive and flourish needed proper leadership for their effective maintenance and urged African leaders to be creative and visionary as the growth and development of a nation depended on the quality of the leaders at any particular point in time.

'Without the right kind of leadership, there exist only chaos, confusion and frustration'.

The CPP Chairman noted that the current political and economic problems besetting the African continent stemmed from the leadership crisis experienced over the past decades.

'Signs of leadership crisis are alarming and pervasive. There is a widespread loss of faith in our major institutions such as the judiciary and law enforcement agencies generally.

'There is an alarming breakdown of traditional values and discipline; corruption is more or less institutionalised and no serious attempts are being made to fight it, we need an urgent paradigm shift to save the continent,' Prof Delle noted.

Prof Delle called on current African Governments to rise up to the changing trend in global governance, offer pragmatic solutions to numerous problems facing the continent with home-grown solutions.

He said the CPP would pursue the goal of peace, justice and security, and struggle for a new and equitable political, social and economic order for total transformation of the African continent.

On the CPP's strategy for re-organisation, Prof Delle said the party would rollout grass-root re-engineering process through the constituencies to the regional and national levels to consolidate, deepen and project the party as a force in Ghanaian political sphere.

Prof Delle noted that CPP would also create a platform to co-operate with other political parties and movements, which commit themselves to similar ideals, and strengthen Ghana's democratic governance through active participation in governance as a prudent opposition party.