THE Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has urged Africans to embrace the mindset of possibility to help accelerate the development of the continent.
He said Africa had not made the desired economic growth because for many years it had not broken the “shackles of the impossibility mindset”.
“Our generation needs to break the shackles of the impossibility mindset and embrace the mindset of possibility.
“It is time for us to figure out the best ways to be masters of our destiny, chart our own path and develop on our own terms. It is possible.
“Africans had, for a long time, not believed in ourselves.
While African countries are politically free, we still have a mindset that is shackled by the experience of 500 years of slavery and colonialism,” he added.
The Vice-President was speaking as the guest of honour at this year’s Africa Development Conference at the Harvard University in the US over the weekend.
The two-day event, which ended last Sunday, was on the theme: “Reimagining Africa’s growth on our terms”.
Participants discussed matters relating to the growth of the African continent.
On issues stunting the economic growth of the continent, Dr Bawumia mentioned the over-reliance on raw materials, instead of the development of human capital, the lack of effective systems, such as identity and property addressing systems, including huge financial exclusion and the manual delivery of public services, as some of the major contributory factors.
He also identified the lack of data and transparent systems as some of the factors negating the transformation of economies on the continent.
“The reality is that African countries have been trying to transform their economies without data and transparent systems, while governments are taking critical decisions without being informed by data,” he said.
He, therefore, called on the people to embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution to address those basic system challenges to break the impossibility mindset.
According to the Vice-President, “when the NPP government assumed office in 2017, we made the ambitious decision to address problems such as the lack of unique identity and address systems”.
“Our decision was to quickly transform our economy by leveraging technological innovations as a means to leapfrog the development process, overcome legacy problems and improve both economic and public sector governance.
“We chose digitalisation as the vehicle and this is why it has become a major area of focus of our government.
“If data is the new oil, digitalisation is the most efficient and cost-effective vehicle for generating the data,” he added.
Dr Bawumia also said that the introduction of a biometric national identification system in the country was a game-changer.
“More than 17 million people, representing over 80 per cent of the targeted adult population, have been enrolled onto a secure database.
“With the Ghana Card, the identity of people (even dead people) can be established using their fingerprints.
This is one of the most transformational projects implemented under digitalisation.
“We have also started a pilot and will likely roll out a nationwide system to provide national identification numbers for children at birth from June this year,” he added.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), Opoku-Ahweneeh Danquah, underscored the need for concerted action by African states to develop a strategy to meet the continent’s energy needs.
He observed that rather than the absence of policies, the major factor mitigating against a common energy strategy in Africa was the lack of political will to implement a coordinated continent-wide framework.
According to him, Ghana was one of the few countries south of the Sahara on track to achieving full access to electricity, including harnessing its natural gas resources to power homes and industries over and above what pertained in other African states.
SOURCE: Graphiconline
