By Kofi Akordor
Last Wednesday, February 15, 2012, the President, Professor John Evans Atta Mills, led Ghanaians and other dignitaries to inaugurate the 14.1-kilometre Tetteh Quarshie Interchange-Mallam Junction expressway.
This project, which is the most visible among the compacts executed by the Millennium Development Authority (MiDA) and funded by the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) of the United States of America (USA), can be described as a gift from the government and the people of the US to the people of Ghana.
It was, therefore, not out of place when both the erstwhile Kufuor government and the current Mills administration came to an agreement to christen the highway the George Walker Bush Motorway, after the US President who gave a favourable response to Ghana’s application to access funds from the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA).
Ghana’s share of US$547 million was one of the single largest to be enjoyed by any Third World country and we need to salute all those who played diverse roles in carrying the Americans along with us in our supplications for such a huge amount of cash to support our infrastructure development.
The voice of Sheikh I.C. Quaye, the then Greater Accra Regional Minister and leading member of the Kufuor government could be heard ringing with excitement when it was announced that the US government had gratuitously granted our dear country the colossal amount of US$547 million as our share of the MCA.
“The money is big ooo!” he virtually screamed, and even went over the bar to declare that all the money given to Ghana since the time of Nkrumah could not add up to that MCA money.
Well, money is nothing until it is put to productive use. Those who have experienced the George Walker Bush Motorway, either driving or being driven on it, have described it as a whole new experience. Without anybody trying to do politics, we have cause to celebrate a project that has given Accra, our national capital, a face of modernity and we should aspire to move beyond this point and begin to look into the future for more of such magnificent projects.
As our initial excitement begins to wane, we must try picking some lessons from the successful execution of that project and all others executed under the supervision of MiDA.
First, we must admit and acknowledge the fact that apart from the funding and oversight supervision which came from the US, the projects were largely supervised at the local level by MiDA, a wholly Ghanaian body headed by Mr Martin Eson-Benjamin as the Chief Executive Officer.
The MiDA Board is chaired by Professor Samuel K. Sefa-Dedeh.
According to information available to this writer, there are 74 Ghanaians of various professional backgrounds and grades on the staff of MiDA. If, today, we are celebrating a good job done, credit must go to Ghanaian expertise and professionalism.
It means that if our professionals fail us elsewhere in this country, the issue will not be about qualification and competence but something else. It could be a problem of poor leadership and lack of direction, undue interference from higher authorities or lack of logistics or motivation.
Very often, politicians take the wrong decisions based on poor judgement, self-interest, cronyism, blind loyalty, nepotism, tribalism and moral corruption and then turn round to question the competence and ability of our professionals.
The failure of almost all our state enterprises, which paved the way for their sale to foreign interests, had nothing to do with the inability of the Ghanaian professional to measure up to his counterparts elsewhere. It had more to do with those who were at the helm of affairs who would not allow the right things to be done.
When we look back critically, Ghana Airways, Ghana Telecom and many others should not have gone the way they did if successive governments had not allowed personal and narrow interests to take the better part of them by employing the wrong people to positions of responsibility to dance to their tunes or cut off those who wanted to be true professionals in the execution of their mandate.
Successive governments have not allowed our institutions and commercial organisations to flourish simply because their interests are personal, not national. It is a policy that has killed local initiative and undermined the efforts of the few who, against all odds, try to make a meaningful impact on the development landscape of the country.
What are described as square pegs have been put in round holes, with disastrous results. Instead of remedying these defects, we choose to turn attention to foreigners in whom we have so much confidence and who come here with little knowledge and return home with bags full of money.
It is a painful truth that if the US government had given the same amount to us or even doubled it and asked us to construct the same Tetteh Quarshie-Mallam Junction expressway, we would have found a thousand and one excuses for never completing it even after 10 years. That is our character — we want the good things of life but we do not want to do the right things to get the good things.
If we had been allowed to work on our own, first we would have been selective picking those who should execute the project, including the contractors and consultants, not for quality but political, tribal and monetary considerations. Even before the project started, people who professed to be our leaders would be struggling to dip their hands into the coffers to take a big chunk of the project money.
At the end of the day, there would be no project and no money, just the skeleton of an abandoned project, as we have them dotted all over the country. Some projects that were initiated more than 50 years ago have still not been completed, while we struggle to make a name by starting fresh ones that may not escape the fate of previous ones.
That brings us to the second lesson we need to learn. We have been told that out of the US$547 million given to Ghana under the MCA, only US$176 million was spent on the George Bush Motorway we are all celebrating. I believe if we were a serious people led by honest and dedicated men and women of foresight, we could have done many of such projects from our own resources over the years.
When we glance through the Auditor-General’s annual reports and listen to the revelations at the open sittings of the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, we will realise how careless we have been in squandering our national resources which go to enrich a few in authority and their business collaborators.
Ghana, with its resources, should not, for a moment, seek external assistance to build roads, schools, hospitals and social infrastructure. If there was that vision among our leadership, we should have transformed not only Accra but all our major cities and towns by now.
Accra’s narrow roads and traffic-choked roundabouts would be a thing of the past if we had allowed our resources to remain in the coffers of the country and applied them judiciously according to our national needs.
The George Walker Bush Motorway is not only a thing of beauty; it is a gift that we must keep and maintain. Both drivers and pedestrians must exhibit discipline on how we use it. We pray that the squatters will not return so soon and turn the beautiful expressway into another jungle of containers, table-tops and refuse.
The most important lesson is that the new motorway is acting as the voice of the American people talking to us to learn to harness and make good use of our own God-given resources.
Now that we know the good things money can do, let us also protect our money and make good use of it.
fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
kofiakordor.blogspot.com
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