Top-to-bottom approach to governance not sustainable – Daasebre

The Omanhene of the New Juaben Traditional Area, Daasebre Professor Emeritus Oti Boateng, has called for a change in the governance architecture of the state with the focus on adopting a more functional community system as the basis of development.

Daasebre, who was presenting his address during the launch of his three-Book-series:

“Development in Unity Development”: Compendium of Works of Daasebre Prof. (Emeritus) Oti Boateng, noted that every nation was rooted in its community, and so if a country wanted to develop, it should adopt a functional model to develop its communities.

The top-to-bottom style of governance, he said, where decisions came from the seat of government, breeds corruption and inefficiency and that development must come from the people “because no one can tell me what I need than myself.”

The Omanhene of the New Juaben Traditional Area is also Ghana’s longest served government Statistician, Vice-chancellor of the World Academy of Letters as well as a member of the UN Civil Service Commission.

Daasebre, who used the platform to launch his award winning Root-Based Model to promote a new development model for Ghana, Africa and regions of growing economies, said his innovative Development model was in response to the demands of contemporary global development challenges, including the reduction of poverty and inequality.

Mr Nyaaba-Aweeba Azongo, a Development Expert, who was the guest speaker at the launch, called for the adoption of a home grown development model as a pragmatic necessity to determine a broad-based development paradigm for Africa.

He called for an end to the frozen intellectual culture of approaching Africa’s development as an exercise in western economic science, where growth indicators were treated as goals and development finalities.

He indicated that the one-size fits all growth model of development was shot down after the UN First Development Decade in the 1960’s and a post-decade conference in Mexico, which came out with the Cocoyok Declaration in 1974 made a global case for an alternative development order, particularly for Africa and regions of growing economies, but the Cocoyok challenge was again left on the stables of western scholarship.

Mr. Azongo said the development industry was at the crossroads and the existing order with all the conventional streams of Economic and Alternative Development models have been a huge failure particularly in Africa and the developing world.

The Economic Growth Model have not been inclusive enough to address Mass-Economic Drop-Outs, Development lop-sidedness, and the inter-generational cyclical financial crisis.
Widespread poverty and inequalities, he noted, are historically proven by-products of the existing growth concentrated pattern of development.

He said “African has a frozen belief in the western economic doctrines to the extent that when sentiments are expressed against the existing development orthodoxy as not adequate in fulfilling popular aspirations and expectations, instead of triggering an intellectual re-examination of these models and theories, one is branded an illiterate who have to be educated to understand the standards of western development.

“Meanwhile, the very sentiments against the western orthodoxy in contemporary African economies by the average African have been expressed and admitted by the leading authorities in the last 50 years and are still admitting the gaps”.

Mr. Azongo called for the adoption and the promotion of ‘The Ghanaian Consensus’ to incubate an African based model for Africa, Regions of growing economies, and even the developed realms.

He said the export value of an African-based development solution incubated in Ghana for Africa and regions of growing economies was a multi-billion-dollar industry with the potential to outstrip the value of the current Ghanaian economy.

He also recommended the creation of a third sector to the private and public sectors in Ghana dubbed: The Traditional Sector or Citizens sector to mobilize citizens from the community level utilizing their own bottom-up indigenous systems of governance to promote sustainable development.

He noted that this was a more sustainable development orientation than external agencies poverty driven relief interventions and the cultivation of a charity recipient culture in the community’s development landscape, which he explained as the very antithesis of sustainable development.

Source: GNA