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JM, your "gargantuan" projects can't give you the votes

The infrastructural projects are good, but they will be more efficient when they get to match the country’s economic needs by lifting the standard of living of the population.

 

“We can’t just be happy because a road has been tarred. We can’t just be happy that we didn’t have electricity and now we have electricity. We can’t be happy with the minimal...citizens must have an appetite for better.”

OPINION: The above are the words of Pastor Mensa Otabil, Founder and General Overseer of International Central Gospel Church (ICGC) headquartered in Ghana during a book launch in Accra on February 15, 2016.

His comments were to buttress his point about the tendency by governments to trumpet their achievements mostly in the form of roads and other amenities.

I tend to second him more on this subject matter. We need not be content with the provision of only basic goods and services such as roads, water, and electricity by the state. We seem to have allowed politicians to get away with mediocrity and substandard treatment. But that should not be the case.

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As the elections draw nearer, President John Dramani and his National Democratic Congress government have begun boasting of some infrastructural facilities they have put up in the last eight years.

Take a look at some of their recent television and newspaper ads, and you are sure to find some of their “magnificent” infrastructural projects; the newly-built community senior high schools, the upgrading of the Ridge Hospital and Dodowa hospital, as well as the commissioning of the presidential library and Cape Coast Stadium among others.

And of course, the recent one has been the inauguration of the completed "Dubai" Kwame Nkrumah Circle interchange to open access to traffic from all directions. The 74.88 million Euro project was jointly financed with credit from the Brazilian Government and the Ghana Government.

But what is the use of these projects anyway, when the economic welfare of the people has been ignored as evident in the poor standard of living of many Ghanaians? Besides, is it not our taxes that are being used to construct these facilities anyway? Or what is so special about borrowing money for such infrastructural projects?

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I dare say that what moral right does the government have to boast of infrastructure; after all governments in the past and even military governments did build infrastructure. In particular, Jerry John Rawlings’ almost two decades in power -- first as a military leader and later as a two-term civilian president – have been credited with massive road infrastructure development and rural electrification projects.

Similarly, during the tenure of the John Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government between 2001 and 2009, numerous road projects including the Tetteh Quarshie Interchange in Accra were constructed.

The government at the time even defied all odds to build the magnificent Presidential Palace, making it the first time in our political history that the seat of government was moved from the former slave castle at Osu.

Of course, it is okay to provide infrastructural projects. Dr. Evans Aggrey Darko, a lecturer at the Political Science Department of the University of Ghana tells me that such projects do matter because “they have economic value.”

“If you build a road, it has a huge economic value. It reduces travel time; it enhances economic activities; it reduces the cost of doing business. So these things have a huge economic impact but you know because they themselves [NDC government] in the past have said, because if you remember in 2008, when the CPP was saying that people should look at their records and vote for them, the sitting president said that if you are talking about roads and everything, it is an exercise in mediocrity. So they are being paid back in their own coin. And I don’t see anything wrong with people paying you back,” he tells Pulse.com.gh.

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Nevertheless, critics of these “gargantuan” projects maintain that what Ghana needs now is prudent economic policies which will impact significantly on the standard of living of people. There is indeed more to governance than just borrowing or using our taxpayer’s money to build roads and interchanges, as well as, schools in communities that cannot produce a quarter of the students needed to fill them.

Right now, the majority of Ghanaians are increasingly becoming impoverished. There is a high rate of youth unemployment; our educational system appears to be in crisis, and the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) system is in a “mess” as some hospitals have apparently reverted to the cash and carry system.

Erratic power supply (Dumsor) is still with us, and the nurses, teachers, and so on are crying over salary arrears.

These are the issues that the government needs to be placing priority on. These and much more are what the average Ghanaian needs to be corrected now. The infrastructural projects are good, but they will be more efficient when they get to match the country’s economic needs by lifting the standard of living of the population. At the moment, the huge projects are not putting food on the table of Ghanaians.

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