<<Print>>‘Travel and see,’ I once said. Others say: ‘you don’t know what you have till you travel.’ I still stand by my travel and see, because I believe there is more to see that should contribute to the motherland’s development.
When you travel, you get to see the good things, such as regularly available electricity, which make motherlands great. It is only when you travel to motherlands less developed than our own that you would return comforted.
Travelling across a motherland once voted the best in the world, I saw so much in six days that makes me wish I were rich. I know I am not; and probably I never will be, given my age. But if I were rich, there is one thing I would do. I would take a president and his ministers that would fit into one bus, such as the luxury one Egya Atta and his ministers rode in to confront customs officers at Tema Port on a trip.
It would be to take them to see what I saw within a period of six days, when my friend drove me around a small corner of Canada.
We travelled some 1,974 kilometres, driveway to driveway. Of all those kilometres, only 53, that is only a tiny 2.7% of the entire roads we drove on, was a secondary or gravel road. The rest was paved, virtually asphalted. A stretch was part of the transnational highway from easternmost point of that huge second largest country in the world to another westernmost point; all 8,030 kilometres of it asphalted.
One reason I would have financed a president and his minsters to travel that same route my friend and I travelled would be to have an opportunity to repeat to them, grounded in that trip, the wise counsel by ɔte Kɔkɔɔso the day I swore my oath of office as a chieftain. He told me that if you are a leader, you prosper only when those you lead prosper. Prosperity is in creating education with work opportunities and taking care of a people’s health.
For those to accompany a president, I would have pleaded with that president not to select ministers the way he appoints them. I would have asked for an opportunity for the ministers of roads, tourism and finance in that order. One principle I would hope to encourage the visitors to appreciate is that the finance minister finances roads which the roads minister plans to expand the economy to create work for citizens.
And in our 21st Century, one of the most effective ways is to target tourism as a moneymaking venture. So you strategically construct your roads to make money which you can use to do other things such as diversifying your economy and creating business opportunities to accommodate other development initiatives.
In the road network we would travel on, they would realise that there is no need in diverting public funds into private ministerial pockets. Once you build the roads, opportunities would be created for you to make money. After squandering the money meant for the construction of roads, you contract an economy as they have done since 2009. They have chopped all the money generated from cocoa, oil, and everything else. By that, they truncated the transnational road; ceasing any activity on the Suhum-Apedwa stretch.
Not satisfied enough about terminating construction, they set out to, and, indeed accomplished the destruction of the Nkawkaw and Nsawam bypasses by constructing ramps all over. Riding on these primary and secondary roads of highways and backroads, they wouldn’t see anything like speed ramps. They wouldn’t have seen one, yes, one, on that 1,974 kilometres we would travel on.
It is not like we lack the technical knowhow; after all, the Pantang-Aburi road was built. It is fiscal discipline in the deployment of our resources, which has been lacking since 2009, that is disenabling our achievement of those road construction feats.
Another valuable lesson which would bring relief to motherland road users would be a toll-free road use system. Of the entire massive road system, not a single one road or bridge was tolled. That is to say, it is possible to construct, build and maintain roads without tolling. That is what you do with windfall monies from gold or oil.
Two basic lessons there: serious governments can build and maintain roads without tolling them.
They can construct and keep roads safely used without obstructions such as highway speed control ramps that unnecessarily impede traffic flow and destroy vehicles while not necessarily guaranteeing lives.
The only way these cannot be achieved is chopping the money that has been allocated to road construction by diverting it into presidential, presidential brother and ministers’ private pockets. That kills road construction and constant electricity supply.