The Editor of The Insight newspaper, Mr. Kwesi Pratt Jnr., has described the crop of leaders fronting Africa’s development as stooges with whom the continent, with close to 50 per cent of the world’s resources, is going nowhere.
It is time therefore to look for a new crop of leaders who will ensure that Africans enjoy the resources of the continent instead of the stooges superintending the regular siphoning of the resources to external interests.
“Africa has close to 50 per cent of the world’s resources,” he said, “so how come that Africa is so poor? How come that Africa is so poor when it is so, so rich? The only reason is that the African people are not enjoying their riches. Our leaders are no longer our leaders. In reality they are stooges of external powers which are siphoning our resources on a constant basis and it’s about time that we began to think about how to create a new leadership, a new leadership which will protect the wealth of Africa for the African people, a new leadership which will insist on a new and fair international economic order…”.
Mr. Kwesi Pratt who was contributing to discussions on Accra-based Radio Gold’s Alhaji and Alhaji programme at the weekend, said today’s African leaders have imbibed economic models that emphasise huge profit-making for capitalist ideologists rather than develop the continent’s abundant resources solely for the purpose of realising the aspirations and needs of African’s.
What is worse, he said, Africa, Asia and Latin America do not take part in the processes that lead to the determination of the prices of their exports. The prices are determined by ‘cartels of multinational corporations and their governments in the Western world’ who control prices for their own expediencies.
He said for this reason, whether African’s export or import, it is a lose, lose situation. It is also the reason Ghana, the world’s number two producer of gold, gets less than five per cent of the gold she produces.
Pratt lamented that the commercial orientation has so eaten deep into the minds of Africa’s leaders that they no longer have faith in the ability of their own people to exploit the continent’s resources to address the concrete challenges that confront the people.
He cannot understand why Ghana, with all the resources available to her, is unable to provide the basics of life for her people. There are homeless people in the country with large homes in parts of the capital which are empty because those houses have been built to be sold for huge profits, and therefore were built without the poor man in mind.
“…For as long as we have leaders who continuously look outside for the solutions to our problems, we have a huge problem and we aren’t going anywhere. For as long as we have leaders who no confidence in the Ghanaian’s ability to exploit his or her resources to resolve the concrete problems that confront the Ghanaian people, we aren’t going nowhere.”
You can listen to Kwesi Pratt in the attached audios: Audio 1
Audio 2
Audio 3
Audio 4
Story by Isaac Yeboah/graphic.com.gh