Mr Charles Abugre an Economist, Head of Advocacy and Policy at Christian Aid in a plea to political parties or politicians in Ghana said; uplifting the north must be a policy priority.

Read below, the speech he delivered at a dinner dance organised by BONABOTO-UK.

Your Excellency Mr Kwasi Quartey, the Deputy Ghana High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Councillor Eliza Mann, Mayor of Southwark, The Hon Simon Hughes, MP, Ing. Matthew Adombire, BONABOTO Chairman, Ghana, fellow Ghanaian immigrants in the UK, friends of Ghana and friend of BONABOTO.

We are gathered here to celebrate not just an association of the Frafra people but to celebrate Ghana as well. I don’t know about you, but I think Ghana is a great place. People say that every Ghanaian is a politician and we are professors – of everything. We love to talk. Just switch on the radio, or go to church or a mosque, or jump on to a tro tro and you will know what I mean. We can make light of very serious things – HIPC junction is what we call the road to our President’s house after he took Clare Short’s advice; Rawlings chain, is the name we gave to the protruding collar bones that most Ghanaians acquired in the early 80s from wide-spread hunger that greeted Rawlings second coming. But we can also bury our heads in the sand. For example, we pretend we are not a poor people and don’t like to be called poor. We can just about live with the being “needy”. We pretend we are all hospitable people. True, to foreigners and visitors, but check out what we do to our poorest people. We can also be hypocritical. For example, we will rather organise an expensive funeral for the dead rather than save the person from dying in the first place. We are a complicated people – much like most societies. We worship wealth but really don’t seem to care how it is accumulated. Still, I love that country for all its many faces.

The one thing I notice about Ghana, being blessed with the opportunity to travel the world, is our sense of national identity. Of course we don’t yet compare with Nyerere’s Tanzania in that regard – maybe because the Scandinavians protected him from being removed from power too early – unlike Kwame Nkrumah. You only have to cross a few borders from Ghana and you will come back to embrace Ghana. This is no mean achievement, given that the entity called Ghana has been in existence for barely 50 years. It was artificially fashioned by throwing various groups together within a geographic boundary which until the eve of independence was contested. The people of northern Ghana and much of the Volta Region were not really part of the Gold Coast that the British ruled over, until very late in the day, although the suffered the consequences of British interests in the Gold Coast. That we have developed such a collective identity is down to the progressive vision of those who led us through independence and what they did immediately after independence to bring substance to that identity.

We have much to celebrate. Our country is currently doing reasonably well. Real economic growth now exceeds 6% and has exceeded 5% for 5 years running. We are of course not yet Botswana or Mauritius or even Mozambique but we are making progress. There is a strong private sector recovery led by small and medium sized enterprises – largely indigenous Ghanaian owned with a strong female participation. This distinguishes us from say Kenya or Ivory Coast or South Africa where those who dominate the private sector are non-indigenous and dominated by men.

After the heady years of structural adjustment – the desire by the west to privatise everything that can be privatised - which reversed progress we made in education and health care in particular, some progress is being made once again. Average enrolment rates exceeding 90% and something of a health system meant to be accessible to all, is being tried. Combined with government investment in the cocoa sector and decent prices paid to cocoa farmers, the level of poverty as measured by destitution-level incomes has come down. We can say that our democratic institutions are maturing by the day. Parliament can no longer be ignored. CHRAJ continues to struggle to address corruption against all odds, and our media – at least the radio stations – are making significant contributions to public debate. As a result of all of these, the country is as stable as our level of development permits, and as a result, Ghana is touted as a good place to do business.

If I sound rather optimistic, it is because there is truth behind it, but as we know about truth, there is usually more than one. We may have made great strides as a people collectively, but we are still a much divided people and the division is deepening in some respects.

No where is the division more stark than the distribution of economic opportunities between the north and the south; between food producing rural communities and those who produce commodities for export and between the drier ecological zones and the wetter ones. These divisions relate to resource endowments and are also historically routed. All the negative aspects of these coincide unfortunately in the north. But as we know, differences in resource endowments alone are sufficient to cause entrenched inequality and social division. Resource endowments need to be turned into opportunity by public policy. Unfortunately public policy in the past 2 decades has contributed directly to the fact of Ghana being effectively 2 countries – a south that’s getting richer and a north that is getting poorer.

70-80% of the people who live in the north are desperately poor - literally destitute. This is why distressed migration is so high. Walk around Kumasi or even Accra or Secondi Takoradi and you can’t fail to encounter all these young girls rushing about with head pans desperate for some “Kaya yee” business. Look to see where they sleep at night and they are no better than a park of sheep packed, filthy in nasty pens. This mass migration of young women and the wide-spread rape that they experience is causing massive collapse of family structures and scary levels of single parenthood, not to mention disease spread. Nobody seems to care. It is not just that the people are desperately poor, they have become poorer over the last decade. The 3 geographic regions of the north are the only ones that got poorer as the country got wealthier.

It is not just income poverty which is the problem. It is food poverty. It is feeder roads, poor health facilities and services and very deprived schools, relative to the national average. Of course income poverty feeds into all of these. In the case of education for example, the continued rise in poverty limits the capacity of northerners to bear or share the burden of basic education as anticipated under the cost recovery and cost sharing measures built into educational reform packages since 1987.

Consequently, all the problems in the education sector in Ghana such as unaffordable costs of education, shortage of teachers, and learning materials, poor enrolments, poor quality of education and school performance, high dropout rates, inadequate infrastructure, inadequate provision for girls and other disadvantaged children are more pronounced in the three northern regions of Ghana than any where else.

Inequality in Ghana has a distinctively clustered flavour– what researchers call horizontal, or polarised, inequality. It is not simply a north-south phenomenon. It is that even in the richer areas of the south the poor are predominantly from the north. This association of poverty and lack of opportunity with distinctive social clusters is a lethal and dangerous, development.

It is dangerous for several reasons. It transmits poverty over generations creating a chronic situation and an underclass. It constrains social integration and may even escalate into social conflicts of all sorts, including violent conflicts. Inequality which is socially clustered provide grievance for the spread and exportation of conflicts. There is too much evidence of these in our sub-region to take lightly. 2 years ago, for the first time in my memory, we saw young people marching on the streets of Tamale, Bolga and Wa against inequality and discrimination. My theory about why Ghana has not descended into the conflicts afflicting the West African sub-region is that our founding leaders minimised that risk by investing in equitable development such that all, irrespective of geography can participate in wealth creation and employment. This is also why Tanzania remains stable and peaceful and Uganda and Kenya have descended into strife and violence.

But addressing inequality and poverty of the north and northerners is not just for the expedience of peace but is justified by economics. Recent studies supported by DFID suggests that if the north were growing at the same rate as the rest of the country, our overall GDP would have increased by 0.7% annually and over 5 years would have added cumulatively 5% to Ghana’s GDP. This lost opportunity for broad-based growth is a failure of policy.

There is another compelling reason why uplifting the north must be a policy priority. Mahatma Gandhi famously said that the mark of a civilised people lies in what they do to their poorest and lowliest people. By that measure, our civilization has a long way to go.

The growth in inequality is directly policy related. The introduction of fee-paying education and health care policy, the removal abruptly of so-called pupil teachers without the capacity to replace them with qualified ones, the attempted abolition of boarding school, the privatization of agricultural extension services and removal of input subsidies from the sector in particular, and shift of policy focus from food-sector agriculture upon which the north depends, into export commodities – cocoa, pineapples – and forest tree harvesting etc. reversed the fortunes of the north dramatically and set in train the mass migration I mentioned.

There is some merit in the discrimination charge that the young people who marched against inequality made. World Bank public expenditure surveys reveal government expenditure in virtually every sector was systematically lower in per capita terms in the north than the national average. For example in relation to education whereas recurrent expenditure per pupil for 1992 – 1994 averaged $22.05 and $22.09 in the Upper East and Upper West respectively, the expenditures for Central and Volta Regions were $174.24 and $61.22 per pupil respectively (World Bank, 1998).

Again in 1997, a greater proportion of both recurrent and development expenditure was made in the Eastern, Ashanti and Volta regions (average 16%), while once again the least expenditures were made in the Northern, Upper West and Upper East Regions, averaged (3.5%) against a population share of 11%. Clearly, if the educational gap between the North and the rest of the country is to be bridged it is imperative that the allocation of national education resources be more equitable and progressive. Studies by the SEND Foundation on the application of HIPC debt relief funds also confirm systematic under-spending, both in per capita terms and relative to the poverty effort. The chronic poverty of the north and northerners in the south cannot be resolved by trickle down from growth, however important growth is. It has to be addressed in a distributive manner through policy, i.e. ensuring that the north actively participates in the growth process. To participate in the growth process requires renewed significant support for food sector agriculture, access to significant volumes of capital funds, not just micro-credit, and sustained access to health, education and disaster-management services.

The north is not without drivers of growth and progress. Various recent studies supported by the international community, not least DFID has shown that. But it does face harsh environmental and infrastructure conditions needing preferential attention. The issue we confront is the so-called political will which itself is, in my view result of the limited vision of leadership and lack of collective political muscle of the north. It is also a result of the lack of serious commitment by the donor community to address inequality, without which there is no chance that Ghana can meet its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) commitments to cut poverty significantly.

Given that the Ghanaian growth process is largely aid-fuelled, the increasing impoverishment of the north is also an indictment of aid itself and an British aid in particular, given that Britain is the largest financier of the World Bank..

To be fair, the NPP government has made important steps forward – the capitation grant in the education sector, the efforts at universal health deliver through, I fear a flawed formula but a good effort nevertheless, and the proposal to establish a Northern Development Fund. The latter seeks a government investment of $25mn for both emergency relief and strategic development purposes to be paid in 2 instalments.

The NDF idea is to be praised. It is at least an acknowledgement of the need for preferential action and in that sense represents some victory over those who have blocked any such initiatives. But the scale of the commitment is a token if compared with the scale of the task. It is even more a token compared to the fact that we spent $130mn to celebrate out independence, the $132mn we spent on constructing 4 football stadia and the estimated $50mn we are spending on the new President’s palace. It comes down priorities and visions of leadership. It comes down to value judgement – what is really important behind a leader’s choice.

Groups like BONABOTO have a responsibility to contribute to making life better but we can never be a solution. We can never reach far enough and urgently enough. Those belong to public policy.

It is a shame that the British government that has done so much to address horizontal inequality in the UK – investing disproportionately to address relative poverty in the north of England, Wales and Scotland often turn a blind eye to the same dimensions of horizontal inequality in international development.

Having said all of these, I am thankful to be a Ghanaian and for the luxury to say what needs to be said in the presence of our leaders.