| |
|
|
|
Commentary
Page
We
invite commentaries from writers all over. The subject is about
Ghana and the world. We reserve the right to accept or reject submissions,
but we are not necessarily responsible for the opinions expressed
in articles we publish......MORE
|
|
Dr. Badu-Akosah, CPP, and
Traditional Institutions
By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong, Ghanadot
Both as a medical doctor, a bureaucrat, a policy-maker,
a globalist, and as an international health expert,
Prof. Agyemang Badu-Akosah is known as a serious high
achiever without any theatrics in Ghanaian developmental
circles. For long time he had been helping develop the
British medical system. Then for his traditional royal
calling (he is a prince from one of the Asante ruling
families) and Ghana’s needs Prof. Badu-Akosah jetted to
Ghana to participate in nation building, tackling
Ghana’s medical challenges, penning insightful articles
about Ghana’s struggling healthcare delivery system and
heading Ghana’s professional medical association for
some time.
In Ghana, Prof. Badu-Akosah came to experience the
rough-and-tumble of the Ghanaian health sector, coming
face-to-face with how majority of Ghanaians struggle
daily to improve their health, and more seriously, how
poor Ghanaians access traditional medicine against the
shortages of the Western orthodox medicine. Overtime,
this has taught him not only the schism between
traditional and modern orthodox medicine and also
traditional and modern Ghana developmentally, but the
challenge of reconciling the two. It is in this context
that Prof. Badu-Akosah argues that there is the need for
“government community based funds” that should “be
channeled to local joint assemblies/traditional
councils” and that “Traditional councils would be
reformed to bring them into the 21st century” and that
“Nananom (Traditional rulers) are our partners in
development…Their wise advice cannot be ignored.”
Now, Prof. Badu-Akosah, one of the key presidential
aspirants of the minority Convention People’s Party (CPP),
which had initially ruled Ghana for almost 9 years under
first President Kwame Nkrumah, talk of appropriating
Ghana’s traditional institutions in its progress, once
again, confirms the growing thinking that Ghana will
develop better if its policy-makers, bureaucrats and
consultants could openly appropriate its traditional
values in its development process. The central thinking,
as Prof. Badu-Akosah and other emerging thinkers in this
context argue, is not “returning to some” archaic,
unrealistic, and unproductive “pristine traditional
cultural milieu to underpin the political arrangements
of the modern nation-state,” as a critic erroneously
claims, but rather the mature opening of Ghanaian
culture, and simultaneously appropriating its good parts
and refining its inhibiting aspects for policy-making,
bureaucratizing and consultancies.
The thinking, of which Prof. Badu-Akosah need to play
with, is that you do not give up your values for “Other”
values to develop, as has been the case with Ghana and
Africa for the past 50 years – no society develops from
such practice, as the British-Indian writer Salman
Rashdi would say. The current developmental picture is
that either Ghanaian/African elites do not know what
they doing or are confused or do not understand their
environment in the context of developing policies,
bureaucratizing or consulting when thinking of their
societies’ progress. This has been the case in Africa
since colonial rule and this has negatively affected
Africa’s development process over the years effectively
closing huge traditional values for progress. The
inference, as some international development experts
will tell Prof. Badu-Akosah, is that not only is
Ghana/Africa not having good policy-makers, bureaucrats
or consultants but they don’t have confidence in their
own innate traditional values that have been sustaining
Africa for centuries. If anything at all, Africa’s
history, norms, values and traditions should drive its
progress or Africa’s policy-making, bureaucratizing and
consultancies should be able to play with Africa’s
history and traditional values by either juggling them
or mixing them with Africa’s colonial legacies and the
global progress values for the continent’s progress.
Fruitful advancement of Africa’s progress will come from
such best practices in the long run.
These inadequacies are seen in Ghanaian-born Dr. Y.K.
Amoako, former head of the UN Economic Commission of
Africa, observation that Africa is the only region in
the world where its development process is dominated by
foreign development paradigms to the detriment of its
own traditional values. One African country that comes
out of Dr. Amoako’s observation is Botswana where its
development paradigms are proportionally informed by its
core traditional values and that of its ex-colonial and
the global ones, as Scott A. Beaulier (of Mercer
University, USA) and J. Robert Subrick (George Mason
University, USA) variously explain. Practically and
globally, this is nothing new – Southeast Asia’s
prosperity has come about by their policy-makers,
bureaucrats and consultants’ ability to mix their
traditional values with that of the global development
process.
Prof. Badu-Akosah’s new thinking and conviction comes in
the context of the nostalgia of yesteryears giving way
to uncompromisingly active intellectual inquiry into
Ghana’s development process – even from non-Ghanaians
(Readers can read the publisher of the Washington D.C-based
www.ghanadot.com, E. Ablorh-Odjidja’s insightful piece,
“What Sekou may have missed about Nkrumah’s good work,”
which reveals that unknown to most Ghanaians, the
on-going development process is more or less a follow-up
of Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples Party (CPP) no
matter the party in power despite the fact the main
opposition National Democratic Party (NDC) did less in
this regard though it was in power for 19 years).
For historical and material reasons, Prof. Badu-Akosah
should have solid reasons to help midwife a new
generation of policy-makers, bureaucrats and consultants
whose work will be driven by Ghanaian traditional values
as way of correcting the mistakes of yesteryears, more
so during the rule of his CPP under Kwame Nkrumah. For
despite Ghana’s first President Nkrumah’s grand
developmental visions – Akosombo Dam, Tema Harbour,
University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, among
others – under the CPP that Prof. Badu-Akosah wants to
lead, one mistake Nkrumah made was to harshly
marginalize traditional institutions, as the fertilizer
for Ghana’s progress, in the greater development of
Ghana. Partisan politics aside, Prof. Badu-Akosah has to
help enhance what President Kufour has set in motion in
this regard, courting those who think in this direction,
consulting traditional institutions, and making global
outreach to help deepen it where necessary.
Kofi Akosah-Sarpong,
Canada, August 15, 2007
|
|
| |
|
.......More |
|
 |
 |
|
61 parcels of cocaine arrest at
Tema Habour
Accra, May 20, Ghanadot - A combined
team of personnel from the Tema Regional Police Command,
National Security, Customs, Excise & Preventive Service (CEPS),
Narcotics Control Board (NACOB) and security department of
the Ghana Ports & Harbours Authority ....
More |
|
|
African countries call for 25
years moratorium to strengthen local industries before
signing the EPAs
Accra, May 20, Ghanadot - A Regional Economic
Partnership Agreement (EPA) encompassing West African
and EU is expected to be signed later this year,......More |
|
|
|
|
|
Abudu Family demands removal of Northern Regional
Minister
Tamale, May 20, Ghanadot/GNA
- The Abudu Royal Family of Dagbon has called on
President John Evans Atta Mills to remove Mr. Stephen
Sumani Nayina from office as
Northern Regional Minister.
..More |
|
|
Rawlings says Ghana inspires many
countries
Accra, May 20, Ghanadot/GNA
– Former President Jerry John Rawlings has observed that
directions taken by countries such as Ghana have served
as a source of inspiration to many countries in Africa
and beyond. ....More |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| |
SPONSORSHIP AD HERE |
|
 |
|
|
|
