A Senior Political Science lecturer at the University of Ghana, Dr Kwame Asah-Asante, has blamed Ghana’s underdevelopment on the poor quality of leadership structures in the country.
According to him, the country has not experienced significant infrastructural and economic growth due to a lack of selfless leaders. He describes this as a “leadership crisis.”
Speaking on JoyNews’ The Probe on March 3, he explained that recent leaders are often ethnocentric, which makes it impossible for them to look beyond their tribes and address matters of the country as a whole.
“The wrong thing about Ghana that we have today is that we are in a leadership crisis. If you look at where we took off from independence, we had great potential with leaders who had vision; whose vision went beyond their ethnic group to move beyond Ghana and other parts of Africa and that you cannot single out.
“We cannot mention names without Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah. He looked way beyond his contemporaries in terms of ideas, in terms of plans, in terms of development, and the rest of them,” he told host, Emefa Apaw.
Dr Asah-Asante, juxtaposing the 67-year-old country to its toddler years, said that those stages were the best, as the then leader Dr Nkrumah saw the nation as a whole, hence his vision to build the Ghana we envisage.
However, he added that after those days, the political system began to decay, which translated into abuses in all sectors and consequently affected our identity as one people.
“After independence, we saw the politics of decay. Politics of misgovernance, misrule, human rights violations, and the rest of them.
“And you realise that all these things have affected our identity as a people and lowered our desire to fight as one people for one cause. Today, you have a large army of youth without jobs, we have a lot of natural resources given to us but we don’t tap them and develop them for the benefit of human society.
“The eco-system that God gave us, that we need to protect and defend, has been bastardised and we have a government that sits down as if it is on sabbatical leave,”he added.
The Political science lecturer added that the situation had worsened to the point that moral values including integrity have been compromised for wealth.
In light of this, he stressed that this could only end if there was some internal evaluation.
“If we wanted to fix this we need soul searching. As Aristotle said, the unexamined life is not worth living. We must come to that realisation that things are not good enough and that there is a need to have a paradigm shift,” he added.
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