This Is What National Development Is Really About

Whenever he cynically and facilely and shamelessly attempts to take undue credit for the implementation of the fee-free Senior High School policy initiative, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, the former President, predictably fails to tell Ghanaians what the impact of this Akufo-Addo-implemented major human-resource development has redounded, by way of its net benefit, to the socioeconomic development of the country at large. At the recent 63^rd Independence Anniversary Day Parade in Tumu, the Upper-West home region of the late President Hilla “Babini” Limann, the Municipal Chief Executive Officer (MCE) of the Sissala-East District highlighted one such benefit; which was that the hitherto mass migration from the North to the South by our “basically” educated youths for nonexistent jobs in southern Ghanaian cities like Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast, Koforidua and Sekondi-Takoradi, among a host of others, had been drastically reduced, as the highly prized opportunities created by the Akufo-Addo-implemented fee-free Senior High School System has further developed the talents and the creative and entrepreneurial capabilities of these young Ghanaian citizens to be able to carve a hospitable and economically comfortable niches for themselves and their various communities (See “Free Senior High School Halts Youth Exodus from the North” Ghana News Agency (GNA) / Ghanaweb.com 3/8/20).

What the foregoing means is that the current curriculum of our Senior High schools ought to be made entrepreneurially and vocationally oriented and pragmatic like the present curricula of the community college system here in the United States of America, with the primary objective of equipping graduates of the SHS system with industrial and commercial skills to enable them to be able to establish small- and medium-scale businesses. You see, contrary to what the megalomaniacal Candidate Mahama would have the rest of our citizenry believe, the least bit of our entrepreneurial and general unemployment worries is the patently vacuous construction of mere physical plant facilities in every one of our present-day 16 regions by the dubious label or designation of technical and/or vocational universities. After all, isn’t it common knowledge that the overwhelming majority of the country’s public tertiary academies are too woefully underequipped for any desperate politician-manqué to suppose or think of redundantly replicating the same, rather than significantly improving what already exist? This is what the legendary Prof. Albert Einstein characterized as “downright stupidity,” that is, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different and better results each time around.

You see, what we really need presently at the tertiary level of our public education system is curricular and pedagogical upgrade, which means that budgetary investment needs to be significantly and exponentially boosted, if the caliber of graduates churned out by these academies is to favorably compare with what prevails in most of the technologically advanced countries around the world. What is quite refreshing to note here, fortunately, is the fact that even as the country’s population has tripled over the course of the last 40 years, the physical plant facilities at many of our major tertiary academies have equally significantly been expanded, for the most part. For example, in July 1985, when I departed the sandy shores of Ghana for the United States, the average enrollment size of major African universities was reckoned to be approximately 4,500 or just under 5,000. Thirty-five years later, many of these academies have notched a student-enrollment size that is upwards of 20,000. The country’s oldest and foremost flagship public academy, the University of Ghana, for example, has already surpassed the 40,000 student-enrollment mark.

In the interim, what is generally agreed upon by many expert educators to have insufferably or unacceptably suffered is the capacity for progressive and creative innovation of these national-brain-trust academies and institutions at all levels of disciplinary endeavor, but particularly in the critical areas of science and technology. Even literary and scholarly output in the humanities and the social sciences leaves much to be desired, relative to what prevails at other major tertiary academies on the African continent, to speak much less about what prevails abroad, especially in the technologically advanced democracies around the globe. The Akufo-Addo-led Administration of the New Patriotic Party perfectly appreciates the significance of education in the rapid and salutary development of the country. As usual, much more needs to be done in the most economically deprived and impoverished areas of the country. And on the latter count, of course, we are thinking about the so-called Schools-Under-Trees. But what did the rest of the nation witness under 8 years of the Mills-Mahama government, but the criminally unconscionable and kleptocratic scamming of the Ghanaian taxpayer and our national resources in the dubious name of humongous Judgment-Debt Payouts by leaders who clearly do not seem to have fully appreciated their civic sense of responsibility to both the nation and the Ghanaian citizenry at large?

All these leaders seem to care about are their wallets and bank accounts, and the least prime opportunity that presents itself for nihilistically sharing the mineral and monetary wealth and other capital resources of the country among themselves. The Akufo-Addo-led Administration of the New Patriotic Party seems to be trying very hard to put the country on the development path where Ghana deserves to be; but, unfortunately, as it is all to be expected under inherited circumstances, there are still too many crooks and reprobates within both the executive and the legislative branches of the present Administration that need to be promptly weeded out or shown the exit without any qualms whatsoever, if Ghana’s former Justice and Foreign Minister is to succeed.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

March 15, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]