Let’s join hands to rebuild our country

The President last Thursday painted a rosy picture of the country’s development process when he presented the State of the Nation Address to Parliament.

“The seed we sowed three years ago has taken roots. Some have even become trees,” he told the Members of Parliament (MPs).

In spite of the good picture painted by President John Mahama, the Minority in Parliament thinks that the President did not paint the true picture of the state of Ghana’s economy.

Whatever positions people hold, it will not be absolutely true to say that the country has not made progress over the years despite the challenges.

It will also be totally incorrect to say that the economy has a clean bill of health.

Sometime last year, the country was experiencing quiet a very debilitating energy crisis popularly called dumsor but presently, the power situation has improved considerably, just short of saying that the power situation has been fixed but for the intermittent shortages.

Despite our seeming challenges, progress can be seen in various sectors of the economy, especially in the services sector.

We know that agriculture and the manufacturing (sectors that must grow to offer the necessary fillip to the economy and create jobs, wealth and prosperity in the land) are not growing.

Today, Ghana has a very big middle class whose appetite for goods and services was non-existent few years ago. What we notice as bottlenecks in the economy are our reliance on imported items of all kinds of merchandise and lack for support to Ghanaians to take control of the “commanding heights of the economy”.

The structural deficiencies of the economy still remain, compelling the government to place premium on service taxes that do not require much effort to collect.

Perhaps, the dualisation of the economy is partly to blame for the heavy burden on salary earners leaving out the large informal sector with a teeming number of players who pay absolutely nothing to the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA).

It is an open secret that the wealth and resources in the hands of the informal sector are huge but our governments have not been able to devise the strategies to collect taxes from players of this sector.

The very productive sectors of agriculture and manufacturing have come to their knees and it seems that we do not have the clues to revive them.

In those days that the country had a very vibrant industrial enclave in Accra and other major cities, including Tema, there were jobs available for graduates and even the unskilled to be recruited as factory hands.

Also, agriculture has become so unattractive that the aged farmers are the only people left to till the land to feed us.

Therefore, the country has to rely on neighbouring countries for food items that we used to grow in abundance here and whose surplus we even exported.

These are not matters to be dismissed with the wave of the hand. They are also not issues that we should situate within the realms of partisan politics.

The Daily Graphic appeals to all to engage in the discourse over the way forward with open mind and give praise where it is due and criticise constructively offering suggestions.

No matter the circumstances in which we find ourselves, we owe it to ourselves and generation to come the need to bond and put the nation first in all our endeavours.