FOREWORD BY THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE I am excited to write the foreword to “MOVING GHANA FORWARD – BUILDING A MODERN GHANA,” our manifesto for the 2008 elections. This is a historic moment for our Party. We have had two successful terms and stand poised to win another. The values of our Party are becoming day-by-day, the values of our country. We are committed to building an open society where respect for human rights, the rule of law, free markets and faith in our country are its bedrocks. These were the values, whose entrenchment in our body politic, were defined as the goals of Ghanaian nationalism on that fateful Saturday of 4th August 1947, when the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) of blessed memory, was launched at Saltpond in the Central Region to spearhead the agitation for national independence and freedom. Unfortunately, however, Africa and Ghana’s political classes subsequently became infatuated with the ideology of centralised control of society and one –party and one-person dictatorships. As a result, many of our leaders were persecuted. Many were imprisoned and some, including the founding father of our tradition, the man whose scholarship gave our country its name Ghana, Joseph Boakye Danquah and his great ally, Emmanuel Obetsebi -Lamptey, died in political detention without trial, much to the shame of our nation. Despite the persecution, those in our tradition never doubted that their values would triumph in the end. Before the Berlin Wall came down after nearly half-a-century of a cold and bitter global struggle, we were on the right side of history. Our first government, led by Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia, showed briefly how great our nation could be by beginning the building of a “property-owning democracy”. In 2001, after thirty years in the political wilderness, we returned to government under the outstanding leadership of John Agyekum Kufuor as President of the Republic and went to work immediately. Within the first 8 years, our government has achieved a monumental record on the economy, in education, in healthcare, in infrastructural development and in consolidating our democracy. Never in the history of independent Ghana has freedom so flourished as in this, the first phase of NPP rule. In 2001, the size of our GDP was $3.9 billion. Today it is $16.3 billion. We have reduced inflation, interest rates and public debt. We have also increased the availability of capital, both from our banks and through foreign direct investments. On the basis of these successes, Ghana is increasingly cited as one of the best places to do business in the emerging world and the best on our continent. As a result of our economic performance, we have been able to make investments in critical areas to a level so far unseen in our history. In education, we increased the percentage of our budget committed to the sector by over 50%. With the additional resources, we introduced the School Feeding Programme and the Capitation Grant, which have combined to increase primary school enrolment by 30%. Furthermore, we have increased the salaries of teachers more than five-fold and introduced distance learning to enable our teachers acquire more skills and knowledge while remaining in the classrooms. At the vi tertiary level, we have made massive investments in long neglected infrastructure that have led to more than a doubling of the enrolment in public universities, from 40,000 to 88,000 students. In healthcare, despite the objections of the NDC opposition who walked out on the parliamentary proceedings, we passed legislation on the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and to date, over 11million Ghanaians have registered under the Scheme that has been hailed as one of the most humane and pro-poor in the world. In addition to these achievements, we have made significant investments in infrastructure, particularly in roads, water and electrification. For example, the current NPP government inherited about 39,000 kilometres of accessible roads and will leave office with nearly 65,000 kilometres. Large areas of our country have now access to potable water which has eluded them for a long time. Between 1994 and the year 2000 a total of 3,804 new boreholes were dug. Between 2001 and 2007, under the NPP, 8,191 were dug. With the construction of the Bui Dam, the plans for which have been on the drawing table for nine decades, we have taken a decisive step towards ensuring energy sufficiency for our expanding economy. While we lay no claims to perfection, there is no denying the fact that the NPP has administered this nation very ably. Nevertheless, we recognise that there are considerable challenges yet to be overcome. It is a fact that too many of our people, including graduates, lack employment that pay a living wage and we shall work with the private sector to create jobs for them now that the macroeconomic fundamentals of our economy are in good shape. Our economy is set to create good jobs for good pay. The North still lags too far behind the South and we must act with determination to close that gap. The gap between rural and urban Ghana shall be bridged by ensuring that our modernisation programme covers the entire country. We shall modernise our society by planning our cities better and ensuring compliance with rules and regulations, and by creating first class public services. We shall pursue in a focused manner the structural transformation of our national economy by moving away from its dependence on the production and export of raw materials. The industrialisation of our economy will be the over-arching objective of our policy in order to provide employment and enhance rapidly the living standards of the mass of our people. The process of industrialisation will necessarily be accompanied by the modernisation of our agriculture to guarantee food security for our people and raw materials for our industries. We pledge to create a value-adding economy that will process most of our primary products, create new industries, embrace the new technologies and make Ghana the hub of manufacturing, financial, and other services for our region of West Africa and beyond. We shall improve the NHIS by streamlining its processes, training more health personnel, building more health facilities and extending its coverage to young people independent of their parents. In addition we shall strengthen care for pregnant women free of charge, as President Kufuor pledged and the NHIS has started to do. We shall do so not to encourage irresponsible vii sexual conduct, but to reduce our high maternal mortality rate and to have healthy children who will grow into productive citizens of our country. We shall enhance the quality of our democratic governance by deepening the process of decentralisation and thereby bringing government closer to the people. We shall create additional districts and put a mechanism in place to examine the creation of more regions. We shall continue our engagement in West Africa and the rest of the continent to promote peace, stability and democratic accountability, to increase collaboration on the resolution of common problems, to ensure the free movement of people, ideas, goods and services across our borders and to strengthen the place of our region and continent in the world. The NPP believes that a more productive Ghana, with industries and services, can sell goods and services to the quarter of a billion people who live in West Africa and thus create lots of employment here at home. While all these are important, the key that will make these developments feasible and sustainable is a vibrant educational system. At the primary level, the next NPP government will build and rehabilitate 5,000 school buildings across the country. Furthermore, we pledge to extend free education to the Senior High School level at an initial extra cost of some GH¢125 million. Also, we shall provide public Universities for all the regions that have none and expand the Universities that exist. Each new University will be built with an estimated seed money of GH¢25 million. All across our educational system, the student-teacher ratio is too high. We need to reduce class sizes. We shall commit the necessary resources to train more teachers and build more educational infrastructure. We shall continue to increase the salaries of teachers, provide accommodation for them in rural areas together with appropriate allowances and engage our diasporan professors and academics to teach here through the use of technology, even while they live abroad. In addition to these, we shall make our Universities business incubation centres by building, in partnership with the private sector and the Universities, technology parks to facilitate the integration of technology into all spheres of our national life. Aside from our youth, we shall ensure that, through tax credits, working people can upgrade their skills throughout their working lives. This educational system, coupled with the investments outlined, will create by the end of the four-year term, several hundred thousand jobs annually in construction, agriculture and agrobusinesses, industry, tourism and energy. Our nation stands on the brink of unprecedented prosperity with the oil revenues that will begin to flow into our national treasury in the next 18 months. The strategic repositioning of Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) to concentrate on its core activities, which our government initiated when we came to power, has paid off with the discovery of large quantities of high-grade crude oil. Not only will we ensure that these revenues are managed in a judicious and transparent manner for the development of our nation, but we will also ensure that the major players and beneficiaries of this new industry are Ghanaians.