NANA AKUFO-ADDO COMMENTARY: Building A Society Of Aspirations & Opportunities In Ghana

Campaign slogan: "2012. Nana, our hope for victory"

Ghana's center-right presidential candidate gave a speech today before the center-right Danquah Institute in Accra: "[Ghanaian conservative icon J.B.] Danquah, in 1928, described every Ghanaian citizen as an ‘odehye’ – a royaI of the land of his or her birth. Born free to live free. It follows that once every Ghanaian child is born free that child must be afforded the opportunity and liberty to develop his or her God-given talent in order to put that talent and the skills acquired to good use. Freedom in our time has come to mean not just freedom from arbitrariness and interference, but also the freedom to aspire – the opportunity and the chance to live a rounded, dignified life as part of a society in which, for everyone, there is a place for choice and talent to flourish. It is normal for every individual to aspire to have a decent education, a decent job, a decent home, and to live in an atmosphere of security, law and order. But that freedom is not a license to do whatever you like. Liberty goes hand in hand with responsibility. So, the free citizen is also the responsible citizen."

More: "This open society is not desired merely because it provides for freedom. It is desired because it also creates the enabling environment for a culture of enterprise, innovation and creativity, harnessing the energies of people for building prosperous economies. It is not by accident that freer societies have been more successful in producing prosperous people. They have been successful because such freer societies recognize the desire of people to better their lives through their own efforts. All that they ask for is for the state to guarantee for them an environment that offers them the opportunity for progress, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. All too often we have situations where Government rather than empowering people and unleashing their entrepreneurial and creative spirits actually stands in the way of progress."

He ain't done yet: "Ladies and Gentlemen, for the people of Ghana to drive the development that we all cherish, we first have to believe in ourselves. We have to believe in our God-given abilities. We have to believe and know that we are human beings created in God’s image, like any other human and even better! We have to throw away a mindset of inferiority and looking to some other people to come and solve our own problems for us. With that attitude we will wait forever because nobody is going to solve our problems but ourselves."