The knee-jerk Approaches to Ghana's Problems

Ghana industry capability still remains under-utilize and keeps on dwindling year-after-year. The faster’s growing sector of the economy is the service sector followed by mining , industry and the agriculture at the bottom. Post 2015 saw the promise of turning Ghana from borrowing to production. With massive sloganeering, politicians promised to create the environment for innovation to thrive which in-turn would serve the pace for industrialization. Yet this cannot be said to be the case since most government initiative are knee-jerk approaches to the real problem with regards to industry, innovation and infrastructure.

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Government initiatives such as 1D1F, PFJ etc lacks policy coherence and are merely setup as a conduit to milk the system and lease State resources to their cronies. In as much as the country is seeing some form of capital infrastructures, they are sometimes cited at place just to win political votes with most contracts and loans shredded in secrecy.

Our road networks are concentrated in cities while rural roads remains abandoned. Road financing is major problem, and no measures has been done by the central bank and policy makers to fund road in a sustainable way. Innovation has been stifled due to lack and inadequate legal frameworks and incentives. Ghana has a huge housing deficit particularly in urban areas. This is coupled with rural-urban migration that has overburden the few social amenities in the cities. All policy makers does is to craft policies that are not sustainable but are meant to solve problem in the short term.

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Our built environment is not properly planned even in the nations capital and communities keeps springing up at areas reserve as environmental conservation. Traffic jam in major cities has been normalize with no plan to ease congestion and this has led to the emission of more CO2 gasses from cars. The continues urbanization has seen a surge in kioskification and slums in out mega cities thereby serving as a fertile ground for open defecation and indiscriminate littering in public places.

Our farming and mining activities are not sustainable and are very disruptive to the environment and the ecosystem.Most of our waste are not properly segregated and recycle or used thereby depleting the little we have. All we do as a country is to wait for something to happen and then come up with unsustainable policies or solutions.
As a people, it's about time we stop the knee jerk approaches to the problems suffocating us and come up with real sustainable solutions. Our problems are systemic and needs concerted efforts from all spheres if we are to progress.

Efforts should be made to include traditional and family heads in policy crafting and implementation since they wield much power at the grass root level while the political class also tackles things at the national level.