STAND UP AND SPEAK OUT!

People has sort to associate poverty with Africa and Asia for a very long time. Though this association to some extent is true, it is not entirely so. I believe a lot of people will be chastising the West for their role in the underdevelopment of Africa and the as a result poverty in Africa especially on this day. However, I will like to use this day to actually call on African leaders and Africans as a people to make our own effort to eradicate poverty not totally depending on the west.

When we take issues like traffic jams in the streets of Accra, we can see at least two way by which we lose resources;
1. productive hours are lost to traffic jams in the streets of Accra and the other regional capitals and;
2. at the same time, the amount of fuel wasted in these traffic jams each day, (I don’t want to think about that), will be enough for each one of those cars for another day.
These traffic jams also make the cost of transport high. If we do away with these unnecessary traffic jams, we will be able to save so much for national development agenda. This does not pertain to Ghana only talk about Ubungo - mwege road, ubongo - posta, Ubungo - gongo la moto in Dar es salaam, Tanzania. We see it on television in other place in Africa. In effect we can enrich ourselves by cutting our wastage and managing our things effectively.

For many years there have been talks of eradicating poverty in Africa by the west and believe you me, they have done their share. Imagine someone living in “financial crisis” stricken America paying huge tax and the money being sent down to Africa and Asia to eradicate poverty each year, tell me they haven’t done their bit? Yet we who receive these aids and grants do not use them well. We mismanage them and go asking for more (Oliver Twist).

I will not say we should accept aid or grants or even ask for them, NO! What I want us to do as a nation and a continent associate with poverty, disease and conflict is that we make conscious efforts to eradicate poverty ourselves. We learn to manage well our resource, we learn to plan with the future in mind, we learn to increase productivity and cut wastage, we implement measure that will check waste in our economies.

I believe if we do these and do them well. Implement them to the letter, we will eradicate poverty from African and Asia in the next 10 years but if we want to continue with our wastage, broken pipelines with treated water gashing out, huge traffic jams from three to five hours, producing under capacity in our industries and offices, using official hours to run private business and its likes, then even if all the money in the world is given to us, in the next two months, we will be poor again.
Let us stand up and be counted, let’s stand up and speak out against poverty not just in Africa and Asia but in the world as a whole.