Buy made in Ghana goods!!! C'mon, they cant be serious. Or are they ???

I am sure that many of us Ghanaians have for the past number of weeks been following all the hullabaloo of the national awards.

The argument over this whole period has been about the people the awards are being given to and if the president should give himself an award.

I would like to come from another perspective on these national awards because i do not really care who they were given to and i cannot change what has already happened.
My "beef" with the government is the price of those medals and even more importantly where those medals were purchased.

I was really surprised when I read that the award medals were purchased for the total price of £740,000 from a jeweler in UK, which for me was really outrageous. If the British government decides to buy at this price for their national awards, that’s their problem; it’s their currency and it stays in their country.

Can we really continue producing gold here in Ghana, selling the raw gold and then after that buy back our own gold for outrageous prices from those same people who bought it from us. And then the government says they want to encourage industry for the export of manufactured and processed goods.

I do not understand why the Ghanaian government should spend £740,000 of our hard earned foreign exchange on buying medals from jewelers abroad. I believe Ghana and Ghanaian jewelers have the ability to produce these medals and anything else the government should need, given the right encouragement. Can you imagine how many Ghanaian jewelers £740,000 could have paid, how much development this money could have achieved in their industry. In my usual style, I ask….

Is the Ghanaian government really serious about developing our local industries like they say they are ?..

The government by just buying whatever they need from the country would give confidence to the rest of the Ghanaian public to buy made in Ghana goods. We had this same issue during the 50th anniversary when the government bought the fabrics for the celebration from china. Think about freight costs, cost of travel for those who had to go to china to eyeball those goods etc….; just a little bit of this money could have caused a massive change in the textile industry here in Ghana.

The government claimed that it was cheaper to buy from China. That might have been true; YES!!! But the idea is this; every industry starts from somewhere and the government is the only one with the clout to encourage others to have confidence in our local industry, no one else has enough money and influence to do otherwise.

Respond to this post and let me hear what you think of this and the idea floated by one of the current presidential candidates that in the future, banks operating in Ghana should be forced through legislation to set aside a part of their profits as loans for the development of local industry. I am no economist and have never studied economics, but I believe it’s not rocket science, neither is it computational neuroscience. It’s simple logic!!!, there has to be available credit in the country for industry to grow.

I believe its time the Ghanaian government has confidence in using the industry in the country. When they do then the rest of the people will follow.

I am finished!!!