The President has waxed the lyrical as he always does about the country's economic performance. His speech is rich in rhetorical elegance and self-alulation and woefully inadequate in terms of concrete analysis of the country's socio-economic problems and what his Government intends doing to address them. That this country has had an impressive growth rates in the past four decades is undoubtedly true. However, our major concern is to what extent has the country's leadership taken advantage of the economic growth to address the serious structural problems of poverty, unemployment and economic diversification. Poverty can only be comprehensively tackled on the basis of a multi-faceted strategy of revival of the agricultural sector, diversification of the economy to create jobs and developing a comprehensive social welfare programme.
One of the most serious indictments against the BDP Government is that it has presided over the almost complete collapse of agriculture on which the majority of our people in the rural areas rely upon for their sustenance. A strategy for the revival of agriculture must be premised on the recognition of the process of social differentiation of the rural population, which has been at work for many years. In the arable sector, the majority of the small subsistence farmers are faced with the problem of lack of inputs, access to draught power, irregular and inadequate rainfall. The old methods of tilling the land for decades without vital inputs like fertilisers lead to soil nutrient exhaustion and poor yields.
