Dear Friends and Countrymen

The UK/Ireland branch of the Convention People’s Party, The CPP, would like to express to you a Happy and Prosperous New Year of 2010. May your dreams of a better life and a sustaining livelihood be turned into reality in this New Year and all the years that will follow.

While there have been plenty of promises in the past by others to our people and our nation, there is so little to show for them or even to be delighted about. Promises have become broken and excuse after excuse are being looked for to explain inability and lack of political will to create and share. The longer this goes on the more gigantic becomes the deficit of livelihood and sustenance adding to the disappointment and frustration of our people and our nation.

Let us look at our built environment. Our cities and towns are sprawling out of control and in serious deficiency in any control and management mechanism. Dwellings are being built before water, light and electricity are sought – often never available. What individuals are graciously doing for themselves, in the absence any serious public housing policy and attainment, is left to no management or control lending them to future problems and likely sanctions. Eventually, these unsustainable developments lead to wasteful land use and unmanaged bad lumps/heaps of stacked materials with health and safety and environmental impact problems that will need to be solved. Our roads are very badly designed often bordered by deep and wide open drains even through towns causing danger to health and safety of our people. Small towns and villages are dying away becoming places of sadness and abandonment.

Our education system, once the pride of the continent, has been run down by a systematic inability to develop and improve. Our teachers have been the same old stock of hardworking people. They have remained dedicated and dutiful as are our nurses, doctors, other health workers and many other workers. Whereas changing times and increased awareness require them to be refreshed and re-equipped to lead the new technology-driven and telecommunication-governed awareness, they are left behind and left on their own. How, then, do we champion the improvements in education, health and public service? Policy after policy have forgotten our teachers, nurses, farmers, the youth, the mass of unemployed and unskilled young men and women condemned to a life of no-hope and waste to our nation.

Broken promises have demoralized our nation and our people. Our national institutions have been promised strengthening on countless occasions. What do we see? Those existing institutions, those needed and our values have been systematically eroded or fudged but we are constantly fed with figures and statistics to show how well these governments are supposed to have done. As a nation we have become ever more dependent on remittances from relations abroad to survive. Those who are not blessed with any such opportunity just pass through life hoping and wishing against numerous hardships.

The National Health Insurance Scheme has passed some people by and they live on chance. It is a sad situation to find how some of our people cannot afford to buy the NHIS while foreigners come in and buy into them having access to our health service in blatant disregard for our own people who are refused access due to avoidable poverty.

Dear Friends and Countrymen,

Our entire nation needs a new look – anew look at vision, policy, realization strategies, our material resources and their effective husbanding, our human resources and the necessary skilling, providing of the skill-sets, to meet national development objectives and national and foreign policy and the strengthening of institutions of national affairs.

There is hope. The CPP has the will to shift this nation to a level you all will be proud to show to the world. We are surprised by the pitiful incapacity of almost THIRTY YEARS of the governments in that time and the bilateral bickering and attrition between the parties that have given Ghana mediocre government.

Let us exhort you on this occasion and in this message with the pietism of Lord Alfred Tennyson:

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfills himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me? I have lived my life, and that which I have done May he within himself make pure! ............”

If the toy is broken, as our nation is, there is no amount of dressing up or painting up that can hold it. It needs to be mended to hold. The old order must change and yield place to new. Our nation needs rescuing otherwise our nation-building deficit shall pile up to unimaginable height that will dwarf all of us and what we can imagine.

May God Bless You All.

Go into 2010 full of confidence and hope.

Long Live the CPP!