Aspirant flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party, Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto believes making agriculture a priority can alleviate Ghana’s economic difficulties.
He stated that the country’s high dependency on revenues from oil and gold exports has not adequately tackled the country’s economic needs.
“We’ve been digging gold in Obuasi for how long? Over a hundred years. Where has that gotten us? We’re the second biggest gold producer. Where has that gotten us? It has just gotten us into the hands of the IMF. Oil, which President Kufuor’s time was discovered was going to take us out of our many problems, what has it done? Oil production recently has been going down.
“So these things won’t solve our problem. If we rely on gold and oil and all those things we will forever go back to the IMF and IMF and IMF. We’ll continue to borrow and this significant economic development that we all wish could happen will never happen,” he said on PM Express on JoyNews.
Taking priority in agriculture, according to the former Agric Minister, would provide a steady revenue flow for the government to support its development goals.
According to Dr Afriyie Akoto, the Akufo-Addo government laid a firm basis for that transition, which he hopes to expand on if given the go-ahead.
“Agriculture is one reliable sector which can give us the cash flow to enable us to fund all our activities; to fund our industrial development, our health, our education, our infrastructure, the motorways and the bridges and all those things that we want. It is the only one.
“But we haven’t been prioritised it enough to do that. That is my thesis. And what we have done, the Akufo-Addo government has done is to provide the foundation upon which this can happen,” he added.