Patrick Awuah Jnr, the President and Founder of Ashesi University, has predicted significant challenges for Ghana’s future leaders over the next two to three decades.
He highlighted that these leaders will face growing expectations to tackle pressing national issues.
In an interview with Bernard Avle on Channel One TV’s The Point of View, Mr. Awuah Jnr acknowledged that while the road ahead will be challenging, it will also present substantial opportunities for the upcoming generation of leaders.
“I think it’s the same solutions that you need but I think the demands of future generations are going to be greater. Let’s look at Ghana, when I was growing up, Ghana had a population of maybe 7 million, today, Ghana has 30 million people. 30 years from now, Ghana is going to be closer to 60 million people.
“So in my lifetime, Ghana’s population should have grown by a factor of 10. The infrastructure we need if we grew by a factor of 10 from when I was a kid, then we’re standing still. The hospitals, the courts, schools, everything. So, the future leaders, the people who will be running Ghana 20 or 30 years from now will be dealing with much bigger challenges and will be confronting much bigger opportunities.”
Comparing Ghanaian society to others, Patrick Awuah observed that Ghana faces challenges in developing physical, intellectual, and financial capital, primarily due to a deficit of trust.
“However, the fundamentals of society remain the same. One of the fundamentals of society is trust. It’s social capital, if you don’t have social capital, it’s very difficult to build other kinds of social capital. It’s hard to build physical capital and intellectual capital, financial capital. So what is social capital?
“Imagine two societies -there’s one society where there’s zero trust because everybody steals, everybody is corrupt. Kids stealing from the parents, parents stealing from the kids. And second society where everybody is honest. The first society has zero social capital, those people can’t get together to build a school.
“They cannot get together to even raise kids, get together to farm, hunt, and certainly cannot build a modern state. The 2nd state where there’s high trust, they can move very quickly, they don’t even need to write contracts, they don’t even need police force, everybody is productive, everybody is helping each other.”
#GhanaPolls2024
#CitiVerify
#ElectionBureau
