President Mahama Launches Forty Year Development Plan

Ghana is virtually an inferno now with numerous essential service providers on strike whilst the cost of living balloons and incomes drop, and dumsor threatens to extinguish everyone.

But we mustn’t abandon our long term priorities, and that is what the launch yesterday set out to accomplish.

The plan is to get a long term policy that would guide future governments on their development agendas for the country. It has been necessitated by one of the most enduring qualities of Ghana’s democracy; ‘anything done by my political opponent is garbage’ This has led to several important projects being abandoned immediately a new government takes power.

The launch was held at the Accra International Conference centre on Tuesday, August 4. The brainchild of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), in attendance was all stakeholders, including representatives from all political traditions. Former Presidents John Kuffour and John Rawlings were also in attendance.

The plan has many stages to go through before finally being ratified, tentatively set for 2018-2057. It was borne out of the recommendations of the recent constitutional review committee, and is meant to go through parliamentary review every ten years.

The problem with Ghana has never been making grand plans, it has always been translating those grand plans into tangible results for us, the people. As laudable as a strategic long term plan may be, nothing about the political process here gives me any optimism about the prospects of this thing; that is if it even gets put into practice in the first place.