Presentation On Peacebuilding And Security

Where we have the young people being ushered into the understanding who they are as a people, who they are as individuals, as citizens in their various communities. So you have all the school happening, children are spending hours and hours in school, years and years in university and coming out as unemployed, employable graduates. That is the problem.

There is a mismatch between the courses being offered at the university and the job market. You go there, you want to do agric they say there is no spot for agric go and do philosophy. What are you going to use it for? There is nothing about guesswork in nation building in development. we have a national development planning commission, we have the Ghana Statistical Service, we had the census that was done last year. We know how many young people there are, we know the breakdown of their ages, we know how many medical schools there are, we know what the doctor-patient ration should be. We don’t have to invent the wheel. There are international standards. We know what the teacher-student ratio should be so that we can make sure we are delivering on optimum health care, optimal education. We know all of this. Why is it not translating into the quota for people going into the tertiary institutions? So that at the end of it, you know that in five years time you’re going to have x number of doctors coming out because we can position them here here and here…we have. We have x number of teachers because we need qualified teachers. The most important person. The most important person in a country when it comes to teaching or leading your people is your teachers. Don’t fail and think you can go and become a teacher to my child. No! The Teacher sets the foundation. The teacher sets your conscience right and the kind of citizen you become.

And if we are no longer doing the dipo rights etc and we’re making our children spend all their time in school, there must be a connect. There must be something that is making up for the cultural orientation that exists in our schooling, our education. If that is strong no one can radicalize you because you have no ambiguity about who you are as a citizen of your country. There’s a problem and yes it’s true. It comes from the governance system that we’ve put in place and it isn’t the institutions, it is the people because we have every policy, we have every law, we have every regulation and everything is in place. Ghana has a national security strategy – did you know that? Yes, we have one. It’s available online, please look it up, read it. Ghana has a national framework for preventing and countering violent extremism and terrorism. Did you know that? It exists. These documents you are looking at are documents that were looked at that were put together by people from different political backgrounds, different ideologies, different orientations, different religions because it needed to be something that was all inclusive so that another government doesn’t come and say this is not ours we are it. It must stand the test of time. It must be a living document that can be improved upon. But you know one thing, one of the biggest things in both is the youth which means like Prof Annin said, it’s an existential threat. If we are not seeing issues concerning the youth as urgent as important as crucial to our survival as a nation then we are really on the wrong track. You are everything.

There are different definitions for terrorism and it’s difficult to capture it because in some places what is being as terrorist is being viewed as the person who is providing water to somebody’s community because the government is not providing it. There is a break between the government and the provision of services to a community. Some so called terrorist group has caused a lot of damage, however that community they are providing pipe borne water, in that community they are providing clinics. Do you think that community will see them as terrorists? That is the problem we are faced with. These are the complexities that arise when you are struggling to define issues like terrorism or violent extremism or radicalization. As long as things are not the way they should be there will always be the tendency for radicalization to occur because the essence behind that is to seek to change the status quo. So if we say we have free and fair elections and in between those free and fair elections you don’t an opportunity to get into a particular job because you don’t hold a particular party card, what is the point of a free and fair election? If you are looking for redress in a court and you cannot get it because you don’t know somebody what is the point of free and fair elections? If you’ve gone to school, you been told that if you work hard and you graduate you will get a job and you come out and there is no job to be gotten and even the ones that you are trying to get there is a bit of favouritism there and its not based on capacity, what does it matter that your elections are free and fair? It’s not enough. Elections being free and fair is an incident more or less. There has to be that continual process of what happens in between elections so that people understand that doing something at the ballot box means something for their lives over the next couple of years.