Ghana: The African Intellectual: What's the Problem?

opinion

When Mrs. Esi Sutherland-Addy decries the apparently perennial solicitation of development aid by postcolonial African leaders from Western governments, she appears to hit the proverbial nail smack on its head. And we herein hasten to emphasize the verb "appears" because the speaker's put her own credibility on the line.

Needless to say, it is rather disingenuous for somebody who staunchly collaborated with the Rawlings dictatorship in its multi-varied forms to, literally, run the Ghanaian economy aground to be lecturing us on how best to harness our national and natural resources for development. Consequently, when Mrs. Sutherland-Addy, former Minister of Education and Culture, as well as former Deputy Minister of Higher Education, asserts that: "We should not have been begging in the first place," and that all "African nations, including Ghana, have all the resources that are capable of providing all the needs of their people," one wonders just why during the twenty protracted years that she "served" with the Provisional National Defence Council (P/NDC), she was not able to muster such resources to take Ghana, and the rest of Africa, beyond the current eyesore that is our academic and cultural landscape.

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