H.E. Kufuor, How Did You Do It?

Today is about a question to the third purely civilian elected to the highest office of the motherland. It is a question, which I have no doubt many of my compatriots of the motherland would want to ask His Excellency, Mr. John Agyekum Kufuor. It is a very simple question: How did you do it? How did you manage to move a HIPC economy to a middle income economy in less than eight years? How could you fund the pro-poor social intervention programmes MMT, NHIS, capitation grant, school feeding, NYEP, LEAP when there was no oil money and cocoa and gold prices were ordinary? It is a simple but very important question, the answer to which has implications for the future of the motherland. It is the past the impact on the present of which should usefully guide the future of the motherland. Ideally, I would have loved an answer which would be published as this column. But that is thinking which is extremely wishful. It even smacks of some level of arrogance; to think a whole president of the motherland for the eight most productive years after Kwame Nkrumah would do any such thing. Wherever the story may be told would be most welcome. I am just imploring that it be told. It is a story that has to be told. It would be a huge loss to the motherland and my compatriots if it doesn�t get told. One effective format for telling it will be as a book. It is going to be a straight forward story about how things got done. It will be a good book source for governance. It will have lessons on development in freedom: physical, infrastructural and human resource development within an atmosphere of a repealed criminal libel legislation. I can supply leads. One is the story I heard him tell on radio about how a Japanese senator, after driving through sweltering heat to a Cape Coast Fetu Afahye, helped to get the road done. Japan had cancelled the grant that was meant for the road when His Excellency took us to HIPC. But with HIPC still in full force, Japan still funded the road. I also heard His Excellency explain loans and the purpose for which they are applied as a basis for development or underdevelopment. He talked his philosophy of leadership as that borrowed money used to consume suya or chinchinga or khebab, leads to underdevelopment. However, money borrowed to build a road or an educational establishment or health facility brings development. His Excellency Kufuor�s insights on how to control your ministers and ensure that they deliver would be most useful. For the years since he left office, his successors have hardly been able to manage their ministers with such dangerous consequences of heavy unwarranted judgment indebtedness. Insights on how His Excellency managed to keep party and the nation together would equally benefit those who are in control of the motherland�s affairs or seek that control. For example, some have falsely accused him of nepotism and ethnocentrism. If you take a close look at appointments since 2009, you can clearly see extreme political and ethnocentric partisanship. Another area will be how a leader inspires by providing hope. With his account, the rest of us would be able to draw together a profile for she or he who has the capacity to lead the motherland to develop in freedom. For now, we all know that any professor who professes in the ivory tower is unlikely to engineer stable development in freedom. Any PhD holding diplomat is also unlikely to succeed in dealing with adventurous coup making flight lieutenants who would overthrow him and halt the motherland�s development. Similarly, no law professor who secretly admired coup makers and their coups can succeed. It is also clear that any communicator who cannot communicate cannot drive the motherland�s ship of state to development in freedom. Further, no one who has been an MP for a long time and has thus learned how to steal from the state by taking ex-gratia, and a four-by-four vehicle, and a house every four years two, three four times over. Worst of them are those who left university, went singing chooboi, or became a cadre, never paid rent or electricity or water bill or buy gas all their life, now and always earning a living from the state. Some stole as student leaders; they are stealing from the state and will always steal from the state, given the opportunity of being president. With a Kufuor book on his success, we will look for how Kwame Nkrumah managed to succeed. The two together project a profile of a president who can develop the nation in freedom. He may title his book: Leading to Develop or Development-Oriented