Big dreams

By Kofi Akordor
I HAVE been wondering whether God has not been generous enough to give our leaders that magic power for dreaming. I know that every person in the subconscious state is supposed to experience dreams even though a friend told me once that he does not dream while asleep.
Sometimes too we indulge ourselves in daydreaming in our conscious state. This is when our imagination takes into the realm of fantasy as we dream about the most beautiful or the best of things which under normal circumstances are far beyond our reach.
Of course there are a few people who go beyond daydreaming and put certain plans on the ground which finally transform ordinary dreams into a vision which sustains their ambition and propels them towards attaining their ambitions.
I am particularly talking about the type of dreams which challenge people and nations into the future and drive them towards greater heights. I believe this is the type of the dream which spurred the former Soviet Union to put the first human into outer space in the person of Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, a cosmonaut whose Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961.
The Soviet Union’s arch-Cold War rival, the United States of America, took up the challenge and decided to do what was beyond human capability at the time. In 1963, President John F. Kenney of the US challenged space scientists of his country to go higher and land man on the Moon before the end of the decade.
President Kennedy did not live to witness it, but true to his vision, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), beat the deadline, by putting the first human beings on the Moon when the Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969 with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Buzz Aldrin, while the third astronaut, Michael Collins, orbited above.
Individuals, corporate institutions and nations which have made it big, flew on the wings of great men and women who dreamt big and transformed such into visions which led them on the path of success and fame.
The late Chairman Mao Zedong of China challenged his countrymen and women to choose between proving their critics, who claimed they are poor and primitive, right, or defy the odds and prove them wrong.
The Chinese chose the latter option and today, China has become the biggest economic attraction of the world to the amazement of the cynics.  Other countries on other continents especially south-east Asia, where the group dubbed the Asian Tigers are doing marvelous things. 
We all know the miracle stories of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, India and even Vietnam, which just emerged from years of war.  They have all left Africa alone to carry the tag of Third World because they are in a different world of their own.
Do we have such dreamers in our national leadership? Let me illustrate my disappointment with what happened on the Accra-Aflao road last Saturday. An institution, Central University, was holding its matriculation ceremony on the campus around Dahwenya and for almost the whole day every activity came to a virtual standstill.
Traffic on a road which is supposed to link two countries and beyond became so jammed amid utter confusion that movement in both directions was severely disrupted. Some chose to blame the school for the problem. But are we justified to come to that conclusion?
Apart from Central University, many prime residential, commercial and industrial establishments have sprung up along this major road without any corresponding elevation of the standard of the road. What happened last Saturday, happened the same time last year when the same university was holding its matriculation or graduation ceremony and it will happen again next year.
Traffic on that road will increase tremendously when people move into those residential buildings which include the affordable housing project initiated by the Kufuor government which has stalled. We are waiting the day when nobody could move to work, when we are all trapped in unnecessary traffic then we will begin panic measures which will only compound matters.
The Accra-Aflao road should by now be elevated to international standards. In other words, it should have been an expressway passing through no town. If that had been done, nobody will be wrongly accusing Central University for the calamity travellers went through last weekend and which we will be going through for many years to come.
Just as the Americans set a target to reach the Moon within a decade and actually got there, can we seriously say that we have set ourselves as a nation any target to be somewhere in the next five, 10, 15, 20 or 50 years? For example, do we have any target to move beyond major producers of raw cocoa beans and become a major exporter of processed cocoa?
By now it should have been possible for someone working in Accra to close from work and pick an express train to Tamale, Bolgatanga or Wa and get to his/her destination in a matter of a few hours to spend the weekend with his/her family in those cities and return to Accra Sunday evening or Monday morning to resume work.
Even the old railways inherited from the colonial masters could not be maintained let alone new ones being added. Our road network is so bad that travelling in the country is a nightmare. The few good roads have become death traps because of careless and reckless driving.
We have failed to project into the future, our population growth and our educational needs. The result is what we are witnessing today when even BECE graduates cannot access admission to senior high schools.
We have not been able to draw up long-term programmes to facilitate the processing of our agricultural produce over the years. That is why the agriculture sector has not seen any progressive development all these years.
We can hardly point out with any boldness, any sector of national development that has seen progressive improvement over the years. Everything we do is on ad hoc basis which does not augur well for any meaningful development.
Journeying between Accra our capital city and Tema, the nation’s major port city, a distance of less than 30 kilometres, can on a very bad day, become nerve-wracking. We may have a thousand and one excuses, but others in our league at independence have proved that everything is possible if that missing link, the visionary leadership, is available.
We may be satisfied with and impressed by little mercies and indulge in self-praise at every opportunity for very little and insignificant  things. We may spend the greater part of the time talking and insulting ourselves instead of thinking and acting.  But the rest of the dynamic world will not be waiting for us and will, therefore, not be interested to hear that at 54 and in this 21st century, we still have our children studying under trees, when the world knows that we have more natural wealth than those we down on our knees begging them for assistance.
In the same way, they will not be enthused to hear that feeding a few schoolchildren or giving free school uniforms to a few children constitute a big national achievement. They have long passed those stages with serious-minded, focused and visionary leadership and judicious use of national resources.
What perhaps will interest them is the fact that we have an efficient and reliable transportation system to facilitate good business. They will be happy to hear that we have reliable and uninterrupted power and water supply system that can sustain their industries if they so decide to invest in the country.
They will be happy to hear that bottlenecks and redtapeism have been removed or reduced to the barest minimum in government working machinery to reduce the frustrations investors and even the local people go through in their daily transactions with public officials.
They will want to see a clean capital city where all traffic lights are working and filth and chaos that have engulfed us now are done away with.
They may even applaud us, if not necessarily pleased to hear that we have advanced from producers or raw materials to a giant industrial nation making good use of the abundant resources God has generously given to us.
It is time we also begin to dream big. It is time we transform those big dreams into real achievements to be part of the international world. It is time we stop making mockery of ourselves by getting excited at ordinary things we see as national achievements.

fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
kofiakordor.blogspot.com