When Ghana Sells Electricity To Nigeria

In recent times Ghana has shown marked improvement in pushing forward her ambition of leading the West Africa coast. Hearing about its goal of become a net exporter of power in the West African sub-region by 2015 could have come to some as a rude shock but we know serious nations who understand the global dominance game don’t talk alone, they act. They are driven by a burning desire or burden to transform their vision into reality for the common good of their citizenry.

Businessday reporting of this has brought to the spotlight Nigeria’s lack of the requisite will and dexterity to drive her dreams. Ghana incursion as reported by Businessday is anchored on the comatose state of our power sector, failure of good policies, several promises and huge investment over the years with shoddy result or even none.

When nations compete it is for a purpose. We know countries don’t pass the buck when companies move out to another country. We know they how hard they work to ensure a friendly business atmosphere so they can attract talents and businesses.  Countries don’t live on hope that jobs will just fly to them. They go ahead to battle for jobs.  They deploy their tax code to in advancing their economic development goals. When implementing policies and turning them into success is a tough feat but Ghana is showing the way.

When Ghana sells electricity to Nigeria, it will be a new dawn in the annals of our regional and bilateral relationship and the politics that come with it. Considering Ghanaians were once here and today we are in a hurry to buy anything Ghanaian.  While companies compete for customers and countries compete for companies, Ghana has evolved in a way that puts her in strong competition with us.

In all, it really isn’t so much that we need to compete with Ghana. It’s that we need for government to align our policies so that they don’t impede our ability to compete period. With the budget 2012 sent to the national assembly and its short on ICT, we are ask, ‘what is our innovation policy?’ Michael Porter, the management guru and legendary expert on competition puts it this way, ‘regional economies get their competitive edge from specializing in relatively small number of fields where they development unique human resources and infrastructure. ‘How do we engender that thinking that brought Ghana to this point? Maybe we have to begin to look the Ghana way. Humbling it is but we brought ourselves here.