Competitive nature of governance affecting investment — Dr Oduro
The Head of Research and Programmes at the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD), Dr Franklin Oduro, has said the competitive nature of politics and governance in the country is affecting investment in the country.
“The winner-takes-all syndrome is affecting the way we see medium to long-term investment, but all the time, our regimes are looking for short-term investments and, therefore, affecting any meaningful structural transformation,” he said.
Dr Oduro was speaking on the topic, “Mapping Ghana’s political settlement: Implication for development,” at a roundtable discussion in Accra. The topic was “Interrogating the prospects for political, social and economic transformation in Ghana.”
ESID research project
The roundtable discussion was to afford the lead discussants the opportunity to share research work they had done on the “Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID)”.
The ESID research project, based at the University of Manchester, UK, is funded by the DfID. It is intended to research the fundamental question underlying the development of political economy in developing countries through the lens of the “political settlement” concept.
Dr Oduro said the competitive nature of governance in the country had seen political elites looking more for short-term investments and policies that would whip up political support and earn them more votes.
Institutions
He said the institutionalist framework showed that Ghana should be able to govern and develop well because the country had all the best institutions.
“I think Ghana has the best laws enacted to help us govern well, yet we are not governed well, and so we are also not achieving the kind of structural transformation we need in terms of economic development,” he pointed out.
Market led
Dr Oduro said even though both the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and New Patriotic Party (NPP) preached social democracy in their manifestoes, “there seem to be some consensus that the “market-led go” is the way to go and because of that we think that this leads to the demand for electoral accountability and the possibility of losing power.”
“As a result of that, we have seen the ruling elites responding to the distribution of public goods, focusing on social investments, the health and educational sectors in particular because they also respond to votes and political support and that is what the people are demanding,” he explained.
Sharing his research proposal on “State effectiveness in Ghana: The politics of core public sector reforms”, a lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School, Dr Daniel Appiah, said it would cover Ghana, Malawi, Rwanda and Uganda and would look at the state of effectiveness, focusing on the extent to which the public sector of the four countries had been effective.
“We focus on the core system of the state and we are looking at public sector co-ordination. How is the entire public sector co-ordinated when it comes to the distribution of resources and expenditure?” he questioned.
He said the research would also look at civil service management, public sector finance management and issues of anti-corruption.
Giving a background to the research, Dr Appiah said looking at the world governance indicators from 2002 and 2012, one would realise that they painted an interesting picture that countries that dealt with competitive political settlement such as Ghana and Malawi did not do well in building effective public sector institutions.
“But interestingly, you look at countries such as Uganda and Rwanda, where you have a more dominant one-party system, and you see that they were able to improve their public sector effectively,” he explained.
He said a look at Ghana’s performance indicated that from 2002 to 2004, the sector had done very well “but from 2005, it had stagnated.”
Welcoming participants, Nana Hagan of the CDD explained that during the last three years, ESID had brought together a consortium of research institutions, policy think tanks, including CDD-Ghana, researchers and academics to discuss and research the political conditions underlying inclusive development.
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Listen to Dr Oduro in the attached audio below
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