I was part of the very large audience that sat with rapped attention as former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered the inaugural Ghana @ 50 Lecture last Thursday at the Accra International Conference Centre in Accra. It was a quality audience - whatever it is that I am trying to get at here - made up of people who turned up not for entertainment, but shall we say enlightenment. Of course some entertainment is also enlightening

The chairman of the occasion, Professor Adzei-Bekoe, exhibiting that linguistic refinement of his generation was completing his doctorial theses in chemistry at Oxford in 1953, when Ghana was not even born.

Our President, JAK, himself an Oxford man was there. Our Vice President, one of the very early Northern Ghanaian pioneers of the modern science of Building Technology was there. I saw Professor Kwapong, arguably, the most intellectual mind I have ever had the privilege of meeting.

I saw Catholic Cardinal Peter Turkson; Anglican Archbishop Akrofi was there; Sheikh Nuhu Sharabatu came with an entourage, so was Maulvi Wahab Adam Ameer of the Ahmadiyyah Movement in Ghana there in his trademark whites Nana Dr. S.K.B Asante, the drafter of the 1992 constitution was there look, they were all there - quality human resources. The list of eminent people there last Thursday would fill several volumes of Ghanaian "Who-is-who".

I mumbled to myself afterwards: As for the people we have them, so what went wrong all these 50 years ?