Tough, soothing words

By Kofi Akordor
President John Evans Atta Mills virtually brought the country together when he publicly declared that the country will not go down on its knees for aid with strings attached. That sent the adrenalin pumping through our veins with excitement.
That was when the British Prime Minister, Mr David Cameron, made a statement linking aid to gay rights. That pronouncement created the platform for the President to make the most emphatic statement on homosexuals and lesbians, a subject that has gained currency in recent times.
The British Prime Minister’s threat did not come as a surprise to some of us. Earlier in June this year, Mr Stephen O’Brien, the UK Minister in charge of Department of International Development, visited the country and issued a warning against anti-gay sentiments and the repercussions of cutting aid. That means the British position is clear on gay rights.
Some of us are not going to spend time talking about gay rights and how the Western world in the name of human rights have become desperate about it, to the extent that a country’s right to assistance is going to be measured according to how it treats homosexuals and lesbians.
Ghanaians would have applauded Cameron if he had ended by saying the British government will tie aid to transparency and accountability in public expenditure especially by politicians who have developed the appetite for squandering state resources and lining their pockets with what belongs to all.
Unfortunately the issue of gays is something that is not dear to the hearts of many Ghanaians. At least that is what it seems publicly, hence the unanimity in the condemnations of Cameron’s threat.
Some of us would wish that President Mills’s declaration that the country will not succumb to aid with strings attached will advance beyond the gay issue and apply to all other foreign assistance that come with lots of strings attached, some subtle, some direct.
Our worry is how we have become so addicted to foreign aid to the extent that without it, our life as a nation is not complete. We live in a global village and there is no way we can pursue any development agenda without one form of foreign assistance or another. And so far as it is the only option we cannot but go that way.
However, looking at our natural resources, it seems we have made too much fetish about foreign aid. Some of the things we call foreign assistance are nothing but peanuts which only make us subservient to other countries without necessarily contributing to our national development.
Many Ghanaians strongly believe that with the right leadership, we can generate enough from our own natural resources to make nonsense of the type of threats we are getting from the UK government.
Most of the countries we go to begging for assistance do not have a fraction of our resources. So the question is what is wrong with us? For a small country like Ghana with a lot of mineral resources, abundant fresh water and now oil and natural gas we should be the last to be blackmailed in the name of development assistance.
We may be clapping today because we have rebuffed David Cameron’s gay rights and development aid. We will be fooling ourselves into believing that the matter will end there. Very soon, the pressure will be coming not only from Britain, but from all the powerful Western countries and by extension, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other funding agencies.
Knowing our peculiar situation, how long are we going to keep the fight and resist the demands of our donors? The best resistance and the most assuring is to develop and sustain the spirit of self-reliance.
In that case, any foreign engagement will be mutual and not that of master/servant as is the case now. It can be done. China has proved it. In relative terms, we have more than China in terms of natural resources and, therefore, have no excuse to fail.
For David Cameron, we will realise if we are serious that he is a saviour who has jostled us from our slumber because sooner than later the pressures will descend on us like an avalanche and will crumble weakly like a dry leaf. Let us begin to think within and accept the fact that no amount of foreign aid will move us away from poverty and underdevelopment.

fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
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