The Okyehene, Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori Panin II
has urged African leaders to prioritise and use the resources the continent has
been endowed with to improve the lives of its people rather than resorting to
the accumulation of wealth for their selfish interest.
Speaking at the
Ghana Institute of Safety and Environmental professionals (GhISEP) 2016 Summit
in Accra, he said that for any country to achieve its desired goals it is
incumbent on the leadership to desist from using public funds to enrich
themselves in order to help provide for its people, "leaders should prioritise
the needs of the country and provide some basic necessities for its people if
the country want sustainable development.""Tell African leaders the joy
of a leader is not in material possession but the ability to provide and ask
yourself what you have done for your people. We cannot be called the cradle of
human civilization and yet 35% of people don’t have toilet facilities, we cannot
be the richest continent in the world and yet the continent with Ebola. We
cannot remain here. We cannot be silent to the cry of poor folks. This was not
set up by our forbears just to benefit a privileged few. Ghana does not have a
dialysis machine for people with kidney problems yet we order over a hundred
land cruisers into the country. Leadership in Africa continues to break the
principle of priorities,’’ he noted.
The Ghana Institute of safety and
Environmental professionals (GhISEP) is a professional body for safety,
occupational health and environmental professionals and practitioners in
Ghana.
The Okyehene noted that in the current social and economic
environment, only leaders who were creative would be able to move beyond the
conventional methods of doing things and adopt methods that would move with the
times and address the challenges the country is confronted with.
He said
"We are building single lanes whiles else where people are constructing
superhighways connecting cities. We cannot do this as a country from Accra to
Kumasi. We cannot keep doing things the same way we use to do when we had a
population of four million whiles the population has now ballooned to twenty
five million."
He attributed the fallen standards of education in the
country to the failure of various governments to make education a major priority
especially the welfare of teachers.
He stated "Teachers should be
provided with the necessary logistics, we should give priority to the needs of
teachers, buildings don’t teach, learning materials don’t teach, teachers do.
Every child deserves a desk, a roof over their heads it is knowledge and ideas
that would transform the economy."
He noted that one of the key
components of democracy is accountability and freedom of speech and therefore
asked people to demand accountability from their leaders and indicated that "tax
money is for you to manage my affairs and bring me comfort and convenience. All
you can do for me is to be able to live in comfort and safety. They are the
employers and we are the employees giving them everything for free, electricity,
water, etc. and yet they are not concerned about us. We need to challenge these
people we have hired. Speak when you see corruption, speak when you see an
injustices speak when you are confronted with wrong doing," he
stressed.
Mr. Bright Bansah, an executive of the Institute said that the
purpose of the summit was to promote the advancement of the occupational health,
safety and environmental profession and to also provide support and
encouragement for those responsible for managing and promoting workplace safety
in Ghana.
"We are to encourage greater professional and social
cooperation and interaction among members of safety and allied fields and
disciplines like quality and security. GhISEP believes in the philosophy of safe
work in a sustainable environment and seeks to champion this through
professional excellence," he emphasised.
He noted that more programmes on
workplace safety and environmental protection would be rolled out to sensitise
workers in future.
The summit brought together over fifty professionals
in the oil and mining firms, the academia and some regulatory
bodies.
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