My compatriots, anytime congress talks about local content, tell them it is all farcical. You can refer them to Kwame Nkrumah’s TOR. If they resist, tell them all the estates, wherever in the motherland, were the works of Ghanaian civil engineers, architects, draughts people, and artisans of the same motherland.
That can be said whether they were built under Osagyefo or Kutu. I mean areas such as Kaneshie, Osu RE, Teshie Nungua, Dansoman, Kabore in Ho, Kwadaso in Kumasi, Takoradi; everywhere in the motherland shelter was provided by the hands of the motherland.
Busia’s Akrobi, Bunso Nsutam and other model villages as well as Afrifa’s Krobo reconstruction housing are all housing construction projects that were conceived, planned, drawn, and constructed with the expertise of the motherland’s daughters and sons. Kutu’s low cost housing from Kitase to Bolgatanga and Axim to Golokwati were all built by Ghanaian contractors. Osono Kufuor’s affordable housing units were also the work of members of GREDA.
What then, my compatriots, can be a justification for wasting our hard earned money chasing a phantom housing project called STX? How on earth could congress have contracted out 500 housing units to a South African construction company when GREDA is everywhere? Why this obsession with the foreign which tramples so roughly on local content?
The motherland has a whole university and a building and road research institute in addition to ten polytechnics researching or training, or both, high calibre expertise in housing design and construction. If they don’t meet congress’ standards, it is up to their government to engineer their capacity.
Congress will not do that. Congress will rather hypocritically trumpet local content as they totally avoid any possibilities of implementing it (local content) the way it is expected to be.
Why is hypocritical congress so much against GREDA? I heard the twelve-and-a-half years of kioskisation and containerization of the capital city man talking something has been given to landlord Regimanuel Gray. See the small thinking! No one serious about local content will give a GREDA member such small piece of a massive contract and boldly boast of not leaving the organization out of their chop chop housing deficit reduction.
Adenta SSNIT flats and Housing Down Estate, which their own founder they have rejected built, did not require government ministers and vice-presidents and presidents Asia-trotting or Azanialand-trotting looking for companies to come and build houses for my compatriots of our motherland. It is a weird obsession with returning to the Atakwame days when foreign hands built houses in the motherland.
In housing delivery, we have every basic infrastructure for local contenting and so congress has no plausible excuse for sidetracking them in favour of so-called, and in case of STX, nonexistent expertise. That is the extent of congress lip servicing, my compatriots.
Let’s look again at TOR. Just give me one good reason why Kwame Nkrumah’s refinery must be left to rot so that congress can make money importing refined petroleum products. They say we will dodge the Dutch disease. I say with congress in charge, we will not. Not with the congress attitude of self-seeking management of the motherland’s resources.
When we were not producing crude oil, we were importing it and refining it to create jobs and give daughters and sons of the motherland knowledge and skills. I mean knowledge and skills exportable to anywhere in the world to make more money.
It, therefore, doesn’t make any sense closing down the crude oil refining facility now that we are pumping our own crude oil. Unless congress is lying about inability to refine the oil we are pumping out, which we don’t even seem to know how much actually is being pumped, TOR must be functioning refining the crude oil produced from the womby bowels of the motherland.
The history of congress is the history of fancy sloganeering. The revolution is a process. Conscientisation, problematisation and other plagiarized Freirian terms were shouted meaninglessly and blasphemously around. Remember even in the days of the same revolutionary rape of the motherland his jerryship squirmed over sloganeering. Sloganeering was jerryphobic.
Yet the congress penchant for sloganeering has persisted till today. By sloganeering congresspeople reduce serious issues to cheap talk cheapening the talk into serious things reduced to irrelevance and trivia.
Housing of my compatriots ought to be by my compatriots for my compatriots. Anyone who cannot mobilize and organize that is not fit to govern the motherland. Others before congress did it in the face of western economic boycott as in Kutu’s time.
No lies, no sloganeering, no pretending to believe in local content when actions indicate no understanding or appreciation of what the concept implies will only add to the realistion of the impending doom struck congress come December 7, this year of our Lord 2012.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh
