What do we want: Devpt or Museveni’s Siasa?
By Joseph Tumushabe
18th June 2012: I spent the year September 30th 1989 to October 1st, 1990 in the Ghanaian Capital Accra, cracking my brains to absorb the complex issues regarding human populations and numbers.
At the time, the country’s media was full of little else other than President Jerry J. Rawlings this, or Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings that. To say Accra then was filthy was an understatement. It was just a dump with open sewers etc.
The other towns too, were no better, as I found out when the Geographer in me took me to eight of Ghana’s ten regions at the time. Rawlings knew he was a saviour of Ghana, and without him, the country would implode. And he, as well as his cartel of supporters often said so.
I went back to Ghana 18 years later in August 2008. It was a brief consultancy stint, and I went up to Kumasi, then back to Accra. The country had been transformed. The bulk of the development had taken place in only eight years of John Kufour’s hand at the helm, when he defeated Rawling’s chosen successor John Ata-Mills in a Second round of voting in 2000.
In Accra I could not recognise my usual hangouts in Madina, two kilometres from my campus at Legon. No, in 2008, the streets of Accra and Kumasi were only comparable then to the orderliness of Harare. The country was in an election mood.
John Kufour’s New Patriotic Party, despite these developments, was that year slated for a defeat by John Ata Mills’ (and Rawlings) National Democratic Congress. There was no talk of rigging anywhere, and no complaints of voter buying. John Kufour’s name was not on the ballot. He had completed his second four year term.
Ghana is now slated to attain “middle income status” by 2020. And that is in per capita income terms and reduction of the gap between the rich and the poor, not the songs that send MPs and Ministers to sleep when Uganda’s President addresses the nation. END. Login to www.ugandacorrespondent.com every Monday to read our top stories mid-week for our updates
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