Treating Foreign Ministry as Goldfields

 

 Currently, I wrote an article with the title "Ghana Must Work" which expounded on concerns for Local Governance reform that will enforce accountable and inclusive development. This will involve creating more rooms for Assemblymen/women to play dual roles in the Assembly system by encouraging independence of their works while contributing to the decision making process for more holistic assessments since they are the true reflection of their communities as well as the District.

One of the very critical issues facing Africa as well as Ghana is our inability to create enduring and motivating systems that encourage our young graduates to stay and work in the continent. Gradually, we are losing our highly skilled youth workforces to advanced economics, some migrate through further study and remain abroad indefinitely without contributing to the GDPs of their root countries.

 Although, our system may seem uninspiring at a certain stage of our youth development, it contributes greatly to our earlier start of intellectual development especially our Ghana education systems. Where we are mostly enjoying certain privileges such as free basic schools, less or no tuition fees for Senior High Schools through to University, Academic Facilities Utility Fees payment only against the main fee-paying system that few were able to afford, some even add it up with Student loans.

 After all these, state-sponsored opportunities in Ghana or Africa most of our graduates flew their countries to sojourn in advanced countries due to their enticing economic outputs for better life conditions that they are lacking in their mother countries.

But all hopes must not lost, since the advanced economics adopted diplomatic tools as soft power to get their biddings done in their counterpart countries by offering annual scholarship opportunities to numerous postgraduate students to embark on academic and intellectual adventures in their host countries and after that sending them back to their home countries to strengthen their cooperations and use them as the critical mass of powerful minds that will help achieve their foreign policy goals overseas.

This trajectory is recently under scrutiny for another strategic approach, just like the incoming government of United States of America, His Excellency Donald Trump announced that he will be retaining academic pilgrimage who came or will come to the US on Government scholarships to study and go back to their home countries to help develop instead of incorporating their ingenuity, creativity and innovation into their host economy. He said his government will start giving green card to these crop of intellectuals to serve in the US aside the old diplomatic strategy.

Africa or Ghana scenarios may seem similar but our approach is not intentional or diplomatic tools rather despair becomes the driving tools to necessitate our state-sponsored young intellectuals to relocate from their home countries.

The time has come to treat Foreign Ministry as Goldfields instead of relying solely on traditional diplomatic relations such as seeking for aids, grants and loans either in security, economic and financial or historical appeasement supports; we have to adopt new strategy that leverage on diaspora in foreign countries through the host governments on their working conditions and taxes and how we can generate Foreign Direct Investment(FDI) as taxes or levies payment to their home countries aside their remittances to our economies.

Our inability to explore cultural ties in international trading with our diaspora in their host countries have caused major decline in our foreign exchange stability and can be enforced to boost our export-earning apart from the gains  that can be made from our foreign workforces.

Written by Prince Hasevi (International Relations Analyst with also experience in local governance, local economic development, agriculture, food system etc.)