LOCAL CAPTAINS OF BUSINESS MUST BE ASSITED ...Declares former Minister (PAGE 29)

A Former Minister of Finance and Economic Planning in the National Democratic Congress government (NDC), Dr Kwesi Botchwey, has called for an intra party dialogue to select local captains of industry for public funding.
The former minister who added his voice to the national debate on strategies to accelerate economic growth in the country said the selection should be based on standards and merit and not on ‘’any political football game’’.
Prof. Botchwey was delivering the last in a series of development lectures instituted by the Economics Department of the University of Ghana, Legon in Accra.
He noted that the integrity and security of entrepreneurs could be secured in order to stop businessmen from fleeing for cover when a new administration took over.
He said unless drastic policy options were adopted to deal with the sluggish growth in the economy the present growth of five and six per cent could not cause accelerated growth.
Dr Botchway said the economy required to grow at least at a rate of seven per cent on a sustainable basis for the country to achieve a middle income status.
He said a trend that run through all the economic recipes of the South East Asian industrialised countries was the ‘’picking of winners among captains of industry for special assistance.”
The former Finance Minister commended the government for staying the economy on an even keel for long period of time since 2001.
He, however, observed that for the past two years since 2006 public and domestic debts had kept rising which could derail the gains achieved so far.
Prof. Botchwey said unlike the Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) of the early eighties when the donor community was rigid and ideological, the present generation of donors had been flexible and revisionist in their prescriptions of policy options.
He said that had enabled the government to have more fiscal space to manoeuvre and ran a robust economy against a background of debt relief programme and sound micro economy practised by the government.
The former Minister of Finance, however, said the ERP achieved economic recovery with an increase in income of 2.2 per cent but the spill over effect expected did not materialise as investors failed to take advantage and come to invest in the economy.
Dr J.R.A. Ayee, Dean of Faculty of Social Studies, who chaired the lecture, observed that the concept of development was intriguing since it involved values, techniques and choices to achieve a breakthrough in the national economy.