Unless ordinary Ghanaians take their destinies into their own hands and take the recent path of Kenyan and Nigerian youth to demand positive change, no positive transformation can ever happen in Ghana’s socio-economic situation.
This is the view of Prof. Godfred Alufar Bokpin, Economics and Finance lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School.
According to Prof. Bopkin, Ghanaians who hold the view that the political class on their own can change the destiny of Ghana should immediately abort that idea insisting that the politicians cannot change the fortunes of the country on their own.
He explains that the politicians are benefiting immensely from the system and hence will never take any actions that will put their parochial benefits at a disadvantage.
He therefore emphasized that he favors some level of positive disruptions spearheaded by the ordinary masses as has been recently carried out in Kenya and Nigeria which has yielded positive outcomes.
“We cannot wait for the political elite to do the reset because they are the ultimate beneficiaries. They won’t set themselves up for failure. They won’t do that. I favor some level of positive disruptions and they have to come down to the ordinary Ghanaian,” Prof. Bokpin in an interview monitored by The High Street Journal said.
He further diverged from and dismissed the popular notion that attributes the country’s socio-economic woes to the 1992 Constitution. He is emphatic that any leader with the country at heart can achieve great things for the country with the current constitution.
“For a good leader who means well and is driven by a common good can achieve desirable results with the current constitution if you mean well,” he declared.
To prevent the political class from taking advantage of the system, Prof. Bopkin says all average Ghanaians must unite to challenge the status quo by defining what they want and forcefully demanding it from the political leadership.
“Our human weakness is prone to evil and therefore we tend to take advantage of the present system. That’s what we are seeing here. If you look a Kenya, they have worked with the constitution for a while which creates some level of dissatisfaction, but when people went on the streets, the President responded and made changes. The first point was actually not the Constitution. So it depends on what we are asking for. What do we want? All these things are happening because we have allowed it,” he added.
