The Coordinator of Third World Network Africa (TWN), Dr. Yao Graham, says has taken a swipe at one of the three-pronged areas of President Kufuor?s vision of good governance, namely human resource development.

He said comparing the human resource development under the regime of the first president, the late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, to the administration of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), under Mr. Kufuor, the latter?s vision is a joke.

According to him, even though some of the institutions in Ghana today get subventions, these are not in the area of research, saying, ?That vision of resource development is a joke.?

Explaining, he said, ?Research is wasteful in the sense that we sow money at the problem over time, in the belief that something would come out of it. Public investment in research, public investment in training people with technical capacities, which means that it is above the primary school level:

It is a key part of learning any lesson from the ancient targets; of learning any lessons about what the developmental stage should be about, among many other things.?

Dr. Graham who was giving a lecture on the ramifications of February 14, 1966 coup, stated that the vision of Dr. Nkrumah has been consistently eroded and described the erosion of such elements in Ghanaian universities as a tragedy.

He said even though the NPP claimed that one of the pillars of its development agenda is human resource development, a nation of a vision of development which has human resource at its center cannot stop at primary, elementary or JSS education level, nor survive on a ?30,000 capitation grant.

?Although people talk about the human resource development that the Gold Coast had, which was part of the modern colony, the truth is that, a lot of the training under colonialism was in the arts, humanities and the social sciences to produce administrators for the colonial state apparatus.?

? It was in the Nkrumah period that the concerted effort started to develop science, technology and people with the expertise for economic, industrial agricultural, transformation.

So that if we talk of human resource development today, and we compare it to the Nkrumaist vision of human resource development, which some of the things sought from primary, to the creation of universities, the College of Scientific and Industrial Research, and serious public investments in research.?

The TWN boss condemned various negative impressions created about the regime of the first president.

?Today, we have a situation where somehow contrary to the modules all over the world, the people in power in Ghana believe that research can be funded on a commercial basis, so that public research institutions should be self-supporting.?

The Institute of Statistical Social and Economic Research at the University of Ghana, which is one of the research centers in Ghana, just like many of the research centers in Ghana?s universities, today get subventions, but no subventions for research.

That vision of human resource development is a joke.?

Dr. Graham noted that apart from the policies that allow people to pay to enter schools, differentiation of the opportunities gives room to prove that there is no meaning in creating the human resource development that can transform this country, and that patriotism does not exist in a vacuum.