Ghana is an emerging economic power in West Africa. In 1973, Ghana and South Korea had the same GDP per capita. Twenty years later, Ghana became one of the poorest nations on earth while South Korea moved from the rank of so called Third World nation to a Newly Industrializing Nation, ranking among Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. I visited Ghana in 2005 to get my visa. I became a multi-millionaire in one day after exchanging my currency from Naira to the Ghanian Cedi. Because of the inflation rate, I was spending not leas than two million Cedis a day, the equivalent of what international students were paying per year at the University of Accra. When the Ghanian economy plummeted following the IMF and World Bank structural economic conditions during what development scholars often refer to as the lost decade of development in the early 1980s, millions of Ghanian citizens flooded Nigeria as economic refugees. Many found opportunity in our universities and colleges; others in high schools; and a multitude resigned to menial jobs. In the past decade, a revolution occurred in Ghana, coinciding with the discovery of petroleum. They saw the danger that was looming and decided to avoid the Nigerian tragedy. They assembled technocrats and idealists to define an efficient way of managing their natural resource wealth. Through visionary governance, they fixed their electricity problems. They fixed their universities also. Today, Nigerians constitute the highest population of international students in Ghanian universities. And their economy has been working. What is happening to Nigeria? When will Nigeria fix its electricity problems? When will Nigeria fix its refineries? When will Nigeria tackle corruption? When will the younger generation take their place in Nigerias history? When will the youth of today become the leaders of tomorrow?
Posted on: Fri, 21 Feb 2014 19:28:10 +0000