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Visionless leadership, cause of Ghana's underdevelopment

Dr. Hippolyt Pul

By Ghanaian Chronicle

Visionless and ineffective leadership has been the bane of the underdevelopment
of the country and the Northern Region in particular, Mr. Hippolyt Pul, 
Coordinator of the All Africa Peace Building Initiatives of the 
Catholic Relief Services (AAPI/CRS), has observed. 
He said the situation had been made worse by the over-politicisation of almost
everything in our body politic, to such an extent that no meaningful consensus
could be reached for the implementation of important national issues. 
Mr. Pul said these when he delivered a paper on 'Leadership � the missing link
in the politics of development' at the third Cardinal Dery Memorial Lectures 
in Tamale at the weekend. 

The late Peter Cardinal Porekuu Dery was ordained into the priesthood in 1951 
and posted to Nandom, where he served as curate and local manager of schools. 
In 1957 he was appointed the first African parish priest of the Kaleo parish. 
Cardinal Dery was ordained bishop on May 8, 1960 by Pope John XXXIII, and 
shortly after was promoted to Archbishop. 
On June 30, 1994, he retired as Archbishop of Tamale, and on March 24, 2006 
Archbishop Dery was appointed Cardinal Deacon by Pope Benedict XVI, in 
recognition of the great contribution he made to the life of the church in Ghana, 
and to society as a whole. 
The Cardinal passed away on March 6th 2007, during the 50th Anniversary 
celebrations of Ghana's independence. 

Mr. Pul observed that instead of visionary and courageous leadership, 
the nation had been burdened with selfish, unpatriotic and corrupt leaders, 
who, unlike leaders in the Asian countries, had failed to draw up strategic 
national development plans to motivate their people to buy into their visions 
for the rapid development of their countries. 
He said the propensity to politicise and 'partisanise' any issue of public 
interest was so deep that we were incapable of holding any dispassionate and 
objective discussion on anything without trading accusations, and noted that 
it was sad that our political leaders were fanning such behaviour. 
Mr. Pul said the inability to dispassionately debate and agree on issues had 
contributed to the lack of national agendas on anything, and as a result, 
policies and programmes change as frequently as governments change. 

'Nations that have broken the chains of poverty and sustained the development 
of their citizens have done so on the basis of commonly agreed agendas. 
Political debates in such nations are not about what is to be done in any sector, 
but how best what has to be done could be done,' he said. 

Unfortunately, in this respect, the AAPI Coordinator said, Ghana might still be 
in search of her political Moses, a strong visionary leader, who could create 
and champion processes for the creation of national consensus on what needed 
to be done, and then mobilise people of all political and partisan persuasions 
to accept the vision. 
Mr. Pul said the educational system, the chieftaincy institution and certain 
cultural beliefs in the country had also contributed to a large extent to the 
underdevelopment and poverty, in the midst of the numerous natural resources 
the country has.
 
He said, for instance, one of the things that the Asian countries, especially 
Singapore, under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew did, was to make strategic and 
sustained investment in human resource development, through high quality 
education. He said in contrast, Ghana's educational system had been so 
politicised that successive governments have continued to tinker with the 
educational system so much that 'our children never know what kind of education 
they will be asked to get into from one year to the other.' 
To remedy the situation and pave the way for the development of the country, 
Mr. Pul recommended that political parties and other stakeholders such as 
traditional authorities should invest in grooming future leaders of their 
interest groups, through formal and on the job development of their capacities. 
The leadership training and screening process should inculcate into all aspirants
of political office, the virtues of honesty, probity, accountability and a 
commitment to the national cause. He also suggested to political parties to 
change the way they select candidates for leadership positions in the state, 
saying that participation in party or stakeholder congresses, and the ability 
to meet financial requirements for candidature, should not be the only 
instruments for selecting presidential and parliamentary candidates. 

He said it should rather be a requirement that prospective candidates must have
undergone some form of leadership and ideological training, commensurate with 
exposures and capacities required for effective performance at the level at 
which they seek political office. � GNA