Ghana’s persistent struggle to industrialise is less a consequence of limited natural resources than a product of repeatedly abandoning long-term technological and industrial ambitions.
The pattern has left the country revisiting old development challenges instead of building on past progress, cardiothoracic surgeon and former Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng argued at the 14th Professor John Atta Mills Commemorative Lecture at the University of Professional Studies, Accra.
Delivering the lecture in memory of the late president, Frimpong-Boateng contended that the defining difference between developed and underdeveloped economies is not geography or resource endowment but “technological capability”, a country’s ability to “assess, utilise, create” science and technology to solve its own socioeconomic problems.
His central argument was that Ghana has, over successive administrations, failed to sustain that capability, with policy reversals and abandoned national strategies preventing the country from translating its resource base into industrial growth. Ghana, like much of the continent, has for decades “declined that invitation,” choosing not to allow science, technology and innovation to drive economic transformation.
The consequences, he suggested, are evident across Africa’s economic performance. Despite occupying roughly a fifth of the world’s land surface and accounting for a significant share of the global population, the continent contributes less than one percent of global commerce, while the bottom 25 countries on the Human Development Index are all located in Africa.
Ghana reflects that broader contradiction, he argued. Although it ranks as the world’s 47th most populous country, it falls to 148th out of 181 when measured by human development — making it, in his words, a country of “big population, not developed.”
The disconnect is also reflected in the continent’s continued dependence on imported expertise and production. Africa spends roughly $4 billion recruiting expatriate labour, even as some 250,000 similarly qualified Ghanaians and other Africans leave the continent for lower wages abroad. At the same time, roughly 80 percent of Ghana’s agricultural, educational and health inputs are sourced from outside the country, reinforcing what he described as the continent’s technological dependence.
To illustrate what sustained technological investment can achieve, Frimpong-Boateng contrasted Ghana’s experience with that of South Korea. In 1961, South Korea’s gross national product stood at $2.3 billion and was built largely on exports of textiles, plywood and wigs. Today, it is the world’s 13th-largest economy and a global leader in semiconductors and shipbuilding.
Samsung, he noted, began 87 years ago as a dried-fish trading business but now generates annual revenue of roughly $240 billion — more than the combined GDP of some 150 countries, Ghana included.
China offered another example of how deliberate policy can reshape an economy. A 1986 appeal by four weapons scientists to leader Deng Xiaoping over the country’s technological shortcomings led to the establishment of the “863” national science programme. Within two decades, China had moved from negligible solar-panel output in 2003 to global leadership within five years.
Such outcomes, Frimpong-Boateng argued, were the result of “deliberate, long-term investment” rather than accident.
Against those examples, he positioned Ghana’s own industrial history as a story of interrupted progress rather than unrealised potential. In 1963, Dr Kwame Nkrumah introduced a Seven-Year Development Plan centred on import substitution and indigenous scientific capacity, supported by institutions including the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.
Those institutions, Frimpong-Boateng argued, were intended to become the natural “engines of Ghana’s technological transformation.” However, the programme collapsed within three years following Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966, a disruption he said allowed countries such as South Korea and Malaysia, then at comparable stages of development, to move ahead while Ghana lost momentum.
The absence of continuity, he suggested, has persisted well beyond the post-independence era. Despite Kofi Annan serving nine years as United Nations Secretary-General, Ghana did not sign its first industrial partnership with the UN Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) until 2019, 13 years after Annan left office. Even then, the programme was financed by European rather than Ghanaian resources.
India, by contrast, spent five decades building its relationship with UNIDO, eventually transforming itself from an aid recipient into one of the agency’s largest donors.
Frimpong-Boateng argued that the same need for continuity extended to governance. Recalling private discussions with the late Professor John Evans Atta Mills, he said both men believed Ghana’s future depended on moving beyond raw-material exports to industrial production, describing that transition as a matter of “genuine economic independence” rather than political independence alone.
He cited Mills’ decision to reduce ministerial appointments from 87 to 73, a 15 percent reduction projected to save $4 million annually, as well as his removal of ministers found culpable of financial impropriety within months of taking office, as examples of governance supporting national development objectives.
That approach, he argued, contrasts sharply with the handling of the banking sector cleanup, where bank owners arraigned over the alleged misuse of depositor funds later had their cases dropped by a subsequent attorney-general, with some eventually receiving state appointments, including, he said, a gold mine.
For Frimpong-Boateng, such decisions represent more than isolated governance failures. They reflect what he described as “an ethic of impunity”, replacing the culture of accountability he associated with the Mills administration, while reinforcing a broader tendency to abandon reforms before they can deliver lasting national benefits.
He emphasized that Ghana’s technological underdevelopment is largely the result of policy choices accumulated across successive administrations rather than any shortage of resources, arguing that reversing decades of lost industrial momentum will require sustained, cross-administration investment in research institutions and industrial capacity rather than another cycle of short-term policy resets.
