Development, often, is regarded as a process that fosters growth, advancement, and progressive change in the economic, environmental, social, and demographic components. The world over , Nations, economies and its people yearn for inclusive growth that will create the desired development. The process to achieve this remains a mystery for most developing countries such as Ghana. Even more difficult is the process of setting a ‘path’ to guide the mission of achieving the desired change. Ghanaians should know, the ‘Development’ we want is a collective responsibility, its not limited to politicians, traditional Leaders, opinion leaders or a specific group.
Its painful to know that the change process in Ghana, is so slow and complex that even the yet unborn children share the blame of our failures. Everyone in Ghana is blaming somebody for the development challenges we encounter. This, certainly, has created a huge ‘trust’ gap. The ‘people’ don’t trust leaders and vice versa.
Some citizens of Ghana have become extremely unpatriotic and normalizing wrong doing as if it’s a pay back to leadership, making failure a part of the Ghanaian culture. For example, the policeman taking cash and allow misconduct to go unpunished; civil servant take cash before processing documents; health workers will deny the sick services in anger of low remuneration or direct patience to their private facilities; teachers don’t report to schools; politicians get rich overnight, Custom officers will ‘adjust’ the figures and take some for their pockets and so on. In all of these, they all blame each other for our development woes.
Before and after independence, Ghana was in same development categories with Countries like Malaysia and Singapore. Today, there is so much difference between Singapore and Ghana in all development parameters. This could be attributed to the recycling of same or similar development approach. Prof Kishore Mahbubani, former Dean of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, shared some experiences growing up in Singapore. He explained that at the time of independence, Singapore was in the same level with Ghana in terms of development. Today the difference is massive; Singapore is a developed country whiles Ghana is struggling with the basics of economic development.
Prof Kishore Mahbubani explained that Singapore used a secret approach to development that gave them the quick transformation and propelled them to the development they desire. He labelled the approached they used as Meritocracy, Pragmatism, Honesty (MPH) as Singapore’s secret formula to development.
The first letter of the acronym M represents Meritocracy. According to the learned Prof, Singapore decided to give government jobs to the most qualified. Thus, holding on to the principle of the ‘best man for the Job’. Singapore avoided giving jobs especially government jobs to unqualified friends, family, and political affiliates. Prof Kishore narrates that; the lack of meritocracy is a major set back for developing countries. The P, in the secret formula stands for Pragmatism. He refers that to using ideologies that will achieve the success desired. He said, ‘it doesn’t matter if its socialist, capitalist, or combined, once it works as planned’.
And finally, the H stands for Honesty, ‘the hardest to achieve’. Honesty is a necessary requirement in the successful development of the people. Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew adopted a hash approach in punishing wrongdoing with special attention on government appointees. Lee Kuan Yew jailed Ministers who were found guilty of corruption. This way, junior officials were very careful to avoid been guilty. These, according to Prof. Kishore, were the secret formula used to transform Singapore.
Ghana can emulate this to transform and develop. It will start with a collective acceptance, willingness to achieve real change. Ghanaians reading this piece have already chosen who to blame for Ghana’s challenges. Most Ghanaian’s enjoy the blame game, dodging responsibility, and dumping every failure on the doorstep others especially, Leaders and institutions. Meanwhile, Ghanaians are generally unwilling to conduct self-check, if we do, we will realize that individual Ghanaians become leaders and fill our institutions. even more worrying is that when the ‘leaders’ attempt to create real change, some Ghanaians will find faults at all costs and ensure its failure. One will therefore wonder, which approach will ever work; the Singapore approach (Key learnings from other Countries) or Ghanaian must deliberately create the ‘Ghanaian Approach to prosperity’ which seems not working.
By Abdul
