Nana Konadu urges youth empowerment

Former First Lady, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, has called for the empowerment of Ghanaians with the requisite skills to engage in productive ventures.

That, she said, was necessary to support a reorientation of the economy to attract the requisite private investment.

She said the country should ensure the development of economic professionals, strengthening of all ministries, moving away from jobs for party boys and girls and focusing on our priorities. 

She said it should also ensure sustaining a capacity of critical institutional policy implementation and internal assessment of our programmes, and cutting out waste through time management and efficiency, because those things would put the country on the road to attracting private investment.

Nana Agyeman-Rawlings was speaking at a forum organised by the Private Investors Protection Agency in Accra last Wednesday.

She said if Ghana was going to be a major manufacturing country, then there was the need to change certain basic structures and sustain new initiatives, saying, policy makers in government need the capacity to formulate and implement policies conducive to the growth and the development of that sector.

“Within the area of attracting this investment is the issue of integrity. Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking or is around to see what you are doing. Integrity, therefore, can only be seen in the light of our laws – taxation laws, business laws and other laws that deal with business and see how effective they are. Are we able to plug the loopholes in our tax laws or are they loose? Do we deal with people who actually go against the laws and the people who are responsible for enforcing the laws? Do we do due diligence on companies that come into our country? Do we have the requisite private companies coming in?” she asked.  

She wondered if Ghana could not grow its own young entrepreneurs to become the venture capitalists of tomorrow.

“Sometimes, overburdened rules or regulations in a country or an establishment can lead to arbitrariness and, to some extent, the substitution of public purpose for private one on the part of the officers exercising the discretion,” she said.

According to her, present efforts at reducing barriers in setting up companies, regulation to foreign trade investment, foreign participation in capital market operations and public service bureaucracy would be refocused and accelerated based on the lessons learnt.

The former first lady said integrity or transparency would be enhanced when information was made accessible to the public. 

“Mechanisms for encouraging the information flow between the governing and the governed, between financial or capital market institutions and participants, between foreign investors and the captains of the commerce, trade and industry, between the government and the private sector and, indeed, between private/public goods providers and beneficiaries can or should be designed and implemented,” she said.

According to her, transparency or integrity was meaningful and useful in an environment where effective solutions existed, whether social or political. 

“The role of the judiciary must be strengthened in the resuscitation of conflicts in taxation, individual and private rights in production and distribution, securities and land transactions. This same transparency or integrity also runs through security institutions, especially police, customs and tax companies,” she said. 

“These should all be oriented in support of the private sector development. Their understanding of the private sector and what is required to support it should be expanded and improved. The areas for potential collaboration are to ensure transparency in the functioning and the institutional development of the private sector in attracting private investment,” Nana Agyeman-Rawlings said.