Let me take this opportunity
to congratulate you, Mr. President, on your very
inspiring statement yesterday (see ). Its
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vision and compassion should provide a framework for
the deliberations of the General Assembly into the
future.
I should also like to thank the Secretary-General
for his unequivocal resolve to use his tenure to provide
accountable leadership to this global institution. His
call for increased support from all Members in
restructuring and streamlining the Secretariat he leads
to ensure more flexible, efficient and effective tackling
of the many global challenges confronting humankind
is timely and must be heeded.
The unmistakable fact of our time is that the
world is in a state of flux with unmatched challenges
aptly described yesterday by you, Mr. President, as a
confluence of large-scale interrelated crises. That is
befuddling all nations, strong and weak, rich and poor;
but, as you and others have also observed, there are
tremendous opportunities as well. Examples of the
challenges that practically all previous speakers have
alluded to include the phenomenon of climate change
and its attendant snow-melts, tsunamis, floods and
droughts; the difficult-to-explain turbulence in the
crude oil market; the soaring prices of food; the
upheavals in the world financial market; the massive
trafficking in drugs and weapons; and the spate of
harrowing acts of terrorism in many parts of the world.
While some of those problems are natural, many of
them are man-made.
On the other hand, the advent of information and
communication technologies is effecting magical
changes in awareness and making time, space and
boundaries virtually irrelevant to human interactivity
around the world. Discoveries in medicine are
improving the quality of life and life expectancy. Fast
transportation, dramatic feats in engineering and
bioscience technologies with the promise of turning
even deserts into productive land are unleashing
unimaginable wealth among nations and individuals.
Collectively, those opportunities are diffusing power
around the world, to such an extent as to negate any
idea of a few nations having hegemonic sway in human
affairs.
Indeed, the era of the explosion of knowledge can
be said to be fulfilling the biblical saying that
humankind has been created in the image of God.
Humankind is increasingly showing limitless creativity,
which inspires a vision that it is indeed capable of
overcoming the challenges of our time. However, the
problem is one of whether we will curb our self-
centredness, greed, bigotry and petty inhumanities to
allow for the sharing of the outcomes of that creativity.
Left to our individual nations, the peoples of the world
will not be high-minded enough. The main challenge
then becomes how the various peoples of the world
will accept their common humanity as the centrepiece
of their endeavours.
There must be leadership, for which the
Organization seems to have been created. The founding
fathers must have instinctively believed that, with time,
the Organization would evolve into a global
Government. For even as there were marked
geopolitical considerations in the establishment of the
United Nations, the Organization was also imbued with
a powerful streak of morality. With time, the moral
streak has been steadily overcoming the geopolitical
dimension. That perception is what must drive the
entire membership to accept the call for reform of this
global institution and its agencies so as to make them
accountable to Members and, in turn, make Members
accept their authority and direction.
Indeed, the United Nations is the only
Organization in the world with the potential to
command respect across the board. Under its auspices,
strong and rich nations alike are showing increasing
tendencies to share knowledge and finance resources
with the weak and poor. Fellow-feeling in international
relations is also deepening. It is my belief that it is
through the Organization that the world will eventually
achieve peace, stability and prosperity, following the
menacing flux that engulfs all of us now.
It is the same moral streak embedded in the
United Nations that is propelling the development of
the various regional blocs around the world. In the case
of Africa, dramatic improvements have been made in
the last decade and a half. The African Union’s Peer
Review Mechanism demonstrates the great resolve of
African nations to adhere to the rule of law and good
governance. It is noteworthy that, as of now, close to a
majority of the membership of the Union has signed up
for review. It is also significant that many more African
leaders are today acceding to power through the ballot
box.
Meanwhile, under the auspices of the New
Partnership for Africa’s Development, Africa is trying
to pool resources among its members, in partnership
with others outside the continent, to exploit its huge
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potential and to develop its markets and its energy,
telecommunication, transportation and agriculture
sectors, among others. That is the way to solve the
many problems of poverty, illiteracy, disease,
ignorance and conflict. It is Africa’s initiative to
mainstream itself into globalization, and is receiving
the support of the international community. Evidence
of that includes the many joint conferences held with
Japan, China, Brazil and India, as well as Africa’s old
allies in Europe and North America.
While we appreciate the support from our
development partners, I must say that there is still
room for improvement, especially as regards the
continent’s efforts to achieve the Millennium
Development Goals. The various existing forms of
assistance are uncoordinated and insufficiently
substantial to achieve the Goals by the target date of
2015. In that regard, the Secretary-General’s call for
review and quick delivery of support is timely. As
observed in the Accra Accord of the twelfth United
Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the
whole idea of aid is to empower beneficiary countries
to stand on their own feet and to become effective
partners in the global market, from which neither rich
nor poor countries can abstain, given the increasing
interdependence of the world.
In January 2001, I was sworn into office as
President of Ghana on a liberal democratic
Constitution with the same strong streak of morality
that I see in the Charter of the United Nations. The
Constitution acknowledges the centrality of humankind
in all endeavours; hence the provisions for respect for
human rights, the rule of law, gender balance,
accountability and transparency in governance.
But, in 2001 the national economy was in bad
shape and Ghana had to sign up for the Heavily
Indebted Poor Countries Debt Initiative (HIPC) in
order to access funds for various reconstruction
projects for which credit lines were difficult to come
by. With national determination and great discipline,
the HIPC completion point was achieved in record time
to earn debt forgiveness of about $8 billion from
bilateral and multilateral creditors. That success has led
to increased inflows of domestic and foreign
investment that have enabled the Government to
launch, among other social services, a free and
compulsory universal basic education programme and
substantial developments in both the second-cycle and
tertiary levels education.
In the health sector, the first-ever national health
insurance scheme, including free maternal care, has
also begun in Ghana. Concurrently, heavy investments
are being made in infrastructure in the transportation,
energy and telecommunications sectors in anticipation
of accelerated growth in the economy. Meanwhile, a
process to modernize the country’s agriculture through
mechanization has begun to improve the welfare of the
more than 60 per cent of society that is rural and
depends on the sector for its livelihood.
By those policies, among others, the nation is
now in sight of attaining its ambitious vision of middle
income status by 2015, which is also the target date for
the Millennium Development Goals. Those
developments have been crowned by the discovery of
oil in commercial quantities, which the Government is
determined to make a blessing for the whole nation of
Ghana, rather than a curse.
That is the Ghana story as my term of office
comes to a close at the end of this year. The moral I
glean from the story is that development in freedom is
possible. In other words, accelerated national
development and good governance, including respect
for fundamental human rights, are not mutually
exclusive. Indeed, good governance should hasten
development.