By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Nov. 27, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

He may, indeed, not have fundamentally changed Ghana, even as Prof. Agyeman Badu-Akosa claims; but what cannot be gainsaid is the fact that the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) more than quadrupled the size of the country’s economy (See “Kufuor Failed to Change Ghana – Prof. Akosa”). Personally, I would have loved to have seen Mr. Kufuor reconfigure the method by which Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives (MMDCEs) are selected, not directly by the President, but directly by Ghanaian voters. The same process would have been applied to the selection of Regional Ministers (RMs).

This democratic method of decentralization would have empowered the regional and district assemblies in ways that would have freed the President and his cabinet to focus more attention on larger issues pertaining to the general development of the country. It would have also encouraged the various regions to become more economically independent of the central government, as the various Regional Ministers or Governors would have been constitutionally empowered to autonomously enter into some limited forms of agreements with foreign firms and governments aimed at bringing fast-paced development projects to the various localities in the country.

On the education front, for example, Mr. Kufuor could have done a lot to return the country to the old British-inherited qualitative standards. Modified constructively, as well as modernized to cut out temporal and fiscal blubber, as it were, the new system could have been synched with the American system of 5, 3, 4, 4 whereby the first five years of schooling would have been classified as primary or elementary school proper, while grades 6 through 8 were classified as junior-high/middle school, and grades 9 through 12 were classified as senior high school, with the next four years being the 4-year undergraduate tertiary system. Only the first 12 years of schooling would have been required as basic for all Ghanaian citizens, with built-in vocational variations for those who may not have been inclined towards the acquisition of the Baccalaureate degree, as determined either voluntarily or aptitudinally.

For those wishing to acquire the 4-year college degree but were determined, via aptitude assessment, to be ill-prepared, the 2-years model of the US-invented community college system could be presented as an ideal option. Those at this level who were properly assessed and found to be professionally and/or vocationally inclined, could then have been introduced to professional and vocational skills training. And here, of course, ought to be promptly acknowledged that the Rawlings regime had attempted something along these lines, except that it was half-hearted, poorly planned, woefully under-resourced and indiscriminately implemented.

We need to also underscore the fact that it was actually under the tenure of Gen. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong that the innovative concept of the American high school system was first introduced into the country. This project was, however, in its teething stages of piloting when the Acheampong junta was overthrown.

It was, generally speaking, in the area of free speech that the Kufuor government registered its most impressive achievements. And here also, undoubtedly, the lion’s share of the credit belongs to Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party, who is widely recognized to have personally crafted the celebrated Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law, a colonial carryover which Chairman Rawlings had used to nearly effectively muzzle up the national media, both state- and privately-owned. To the extent that free-speech rights are the fundamental engine of democratic political advancement, the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party could be aptly said to have done far better than even the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) to advance the cause of Individual Liberty, as conceived and elaborately articulated and propagated by the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics, Dr. J. B. Danquah.

The latter civic and constitutional right is the highest form of political achievement in any civilized modern nation or polity. And so it is not quite accurate for Prof. Agyeman Badu-Akosa to pontifically assert that President John Agyekum-Kufuor did a diddly little to advance Ghanaian society. In fact, it is precisely because the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party government did so much to advance the civil and human rights of the Ghanaian citizenry that people like Prof. Badu-Akosa have been able to take free-speech rights in the country for granted. Under the tenure of his favorite icon, President Kwame Nkrumah, the pathological culture of silence, so inimitably pursued by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, was pretty much the norm.