Let’s free ourselves from colonial economic arrangement - Akufo-Addo

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has stressed the need for the country to work and free itself from the economic arrangements designed by the former colonial power.

Such past arrangement, he noted, was to serve their particular purpose at the time and it continued to blind the country from achieving its development.

”We must make a concerted effort to break away from the neo-colonial structure of the raw material producing and exporting economy, which has, largely, been our loss,” President Akufo-Addo stated in the press release to wish the country a happy Founders’ Day.

Founders’ Day

A new Public Holidays Amendment Bill, 2018 was laid in Parliament by the Minister for the Interior, Mr Ambrose Dery, and passed to amend the Public Holiday Act, 2001 in 2018.

The amendment bill quashed three public holidays and introduced two new ones.

This followed a proposal by President Akufo-Addo that August 4 should be observed as Founders’ Day in memory of the successive generations of Ghanaians who contributed to the liberation of the country from colonial rule.

The President also proposed that September 21 should be set aside as a memorial day for Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first President, who was instrumental in the fight for the March 6 independence.

Transformation

As President, he said, he was determined to make his leadership period witness the laying of the foundation for the transformation of the country’s economy from an exporter of raw materials and retailer of cheap imported goods to a modern, value-adding industrialised one.

Additionally, he stated that he would continue to work assiduously to provide each Ghanaian with a decent education, a decent job, a decent home, an adequate safety net for the vulnerable and marginalised, and a decent retirement in order to live in an atmosphere of freedom, security, law and order.

That, he said, was what the founders of the nation envisioned for the country as its goal, adding that “Let us all put our shoulders to the wheel and drive our nation to its destination, a united, developed, prosperous, free, democratic and independent Ghanaian nation.”

As the country acknowledged the role played by successive generations of Ghanaians towards the liberation of the country from colonialism and imperialism, President Akufo-Addo said the importance and significance of the day in the life and history of the nation could not be repeated enough.