Prez renews pledge to enhance democracy

PRESIDENT John Dramani Mahama has told world leaders that Ghana has begun a process to review its rules of engagement in order to strike a balance between the maintenance of law and order and the basic rights of the people to free speech and free expression.

The move, according to him, would further promote Ghana’s enviable democracy.

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York yesterday, he drew a correlation between the running of a country and the United Nations (UN).

“What we learned 70 years ago, with the formation of the United Nations, is that we must be each other’s keeper; we must allow ourselves, as people and even more so as nations, to belong to one another,” he said. 

Strides

Ghana, he said, was making strides in economic growth and added that the current agenda for transformation was aimed at diversifying the economy and accelerating growth.

“My government is committed to maintaining strict fiscal discipline in order to stabilise the macro economy and stimulate growth and business activity,” he added.

Power challenges   

That notwithstanding, he mentioned power as a major challenge which was hampering socio-economic growth.

 “Two decades of consistent positive growth has resulted in demand for power outstripping supply. The resulting load -shedding programme has, unfortunately, slowed growth and is taking a steep toll on economic and social life.  

“Small and medium enterprises, which can least afford the high cost of purchasing and operating generators to substitute their power supply, are being severely affected,” he said.

But he spelt out efforts being made to tackle the challenge.

“We are pursuing a programme to put in emergency generation to balance demand and supply. Looking forward, we plan to put an additional 3,500 MW of power into our transmission grid utilising the significant gas reserves we have discovered in offshore concessions.

“This will be supplemented by renewable power mainly from solar, biomass and wind sources,” he said. 

MDGs progress

He touted the progress Ghana had made in achieving the Millennium Development Goal target on universal basic education.

“We instituted the Girl-Child Programme which encourages parents to send girls to school, and at the primary level we have achieved gender parity between boys and girls,” he stated.

But he was quick to mention the difficulties encountered after primary school, citing for instance young girls who were often taken out of school and given into marriage.

The problem, he noted, was not peculiar to Ghana but a continental problem.

“Africa has the highest rates of child marriage in the world, following only Asia. It was the intention of the United Nations’ 1964 Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages to abolish the practice of child marriage. Still, in West Africa, two out of five girls are married before the age of 18,” the President lamented.

Nonetheless, he told the gathering that Ghana was making efforts to arrest the issue.

Democracy and economic growth

He mentioned how democracy was thriving on the continent and said it gave hope of a continent in its economic development.

“Many African nations have embraced democracy and free and fair elections have become a regular occurrence on the continent’s calendar,” he said.

He added that several African nations were also seeing an acceleration in economic growth and working assiduously to reduce hunger and poverty.

World peace

Touching on peaceful co-existence among nations and what it holds for world peace, the President welcomed the recent normalisation of relations between the US and Cuba.

“This is an important first step towards discarding the relics of the Cold War represented by the economic blockade of Cuba,” he said.

Besides, he welcomed “the historic agreement between the US and partners on one hand and Iran on the other to curtail the development of nuclear weapons and encourage the peaceful use of nuclear technology”.

These developments, to him, gave enough hope that the age-old Palestine problem was surmountable, adding that “Ghana supports a two-state solution to the conflict”.