Bawumia urges Africans to have possibility mindset
Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has challenged Africans to eschew the mindset of impossibility and embrace a mindset of possibility, for the continent to get to the level of developed countries.
Addressing participants of the Africa Development Conference at Harvard University in the United States, over the weekend, Dr Bawumia identified the continuous reliance on ineffective systems in Africa as the bane of the continent’s economic growth and development.
He insisted, “the status quo remains because the continent has, for many years, not broken the ‘shackles of impossibility mindsets’.”
He said while African countries are politically free, they still have a mindset that is shackled by the experience of 500 years of slavery and colonialism.
“For the longest time, we have not believed in ourselves. The dominant mindset is one of impossibility,” he reiterated.
Economic growth
Touching on issues stunting the economic growth of the African continent, Dr. Bawumia said the over-reliance on raw materials instead of human capital development, as well as the lack of effective systems, have impeded the continent’s progress.
He mentioned the identity system, property addressing system, huge financial exclusion and manual delivery of public services as some of the major contributory factors to Africa’s stunted progress.
Solving this, Dr. Bawumia noted, Africa must embrace the fourth Industrial Revolution to address these basic system challenges.
“Our generation needs to break the shackles of the impossibility mindset and embrace the mindset of possibility! It is time for us to figure out the best ways to be masters of our destiny, chart our own path and develop on our own terms. It is possible!!,” he told the gathering
Reality
The Vice-President further indicated that the reality is that African countries have been trying to transform their economies without data and transparent systems.
According to him, Governments are taking critical decisions without them being informed by the data.
He added that his government assumed office in 2017, and made an ambitious decision to address the problems of the lack of unique identity, and address systems, immediately and simultaneously.
“The question was what is the best way to do it? Our decision was to quickly transform our economy by leveraging technological innovations as a means to leapfrog the development process, overcome legacy problems, and improve both economic and public sector governance.
“We chose digitalization as the vehicle and this is why digitalization has been a major area of focus for our government. If data is the new oil, digitization is the most efficient and cost-effective vehicle for generating the data,” he added.
Without this data, he noted that African countries will not be able to effectively participate in the fourth Industrial Revolution.
Digitisation
Delving into the key areas of transformation critical to Ghana’s digitisation revolution, Dr Bawumia said the introduction of a biometric national identification system in Ghana had been a game-changer in several ways.
“More than 17 million people (over 80% of the targeted adult population) enrolled in the secured national database. With the GhanaCard, the identity of people (even dead people) can be established using their fingerprints. This is one of the most transformational projects implemented under digitalization.
“We have solved a problem of providing unique identity to our population. A problem we have lived with since independence, 66 years ago. We have also started a pilot and will likely roll out nationwide a system of providing National ID numbers to children at birth from June this year,” he revealed.
The Vice-President also cited the Property Addressing System, Mobile Money Interoperability, Digitalized Tax Payment System amongst several other reforms driving Ghana’s economic growth.
The Harvard Africa Development Conference, brought together high-level participants to discuss issues relating to the development of the African continent.