Reconnecting Africa, Diaspora key to accelerated development — Bawumia
The single most important factor in the development and progress of a nation is its human capital, the Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has said.
He said it was, therefore, crucial to reconnect Africans on the continent and those in the Diaspora to accelerate the emancipation of the African continent.
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The Vice-President was speaking at the 150th anniversary of the birth of Dr W.E.B. Du Bois in Accra yesterday.
He said the destiny of Africans anywhere in the world was irrevocably tied to the destiny of Africa. Born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, a small town in Massachusetts in the United States of America (USA), Dr Du Bois was a leader in the pan-African movement that sought solidarity among all people of African descent.
He was a major influence on Ghana’s first President, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, especially after they met at the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England.
Invitation
Du Bois travelled to Ghana in 1961 at the invitation of Dr Nkrumah to help write the Encyclopedia Africana.
He renounced his US citizenship, became a citizen of Ghana and lived here until his death in 1963 at the age of 95.
Alluding to Dr Du Bois’s drive to reconnect the African Diaspora to the continent, Dr Bawumia said almost 400 years after the advent of slavery, Africa was still strong and with a growing population billed to be the largest in the world by 2050.
He said a focus on developing the human capital of persons of African descent would help the continent assume its rightful place in the world.
“It is important for Africans to recognise that we are all Africans, whether you are in the Diaspora or on the continent.
“It doesn't matter if you are a billionaire walking on the streets of America as a Black man; they will see you no different from anybody walking on the streets of Africa, and so the emancipation of people of African descent lies in the emancipation of Africa.
“That lesson for me is very very important, and that is why we have to grow and move beyond aid and develop our continent,” the Vice-President added.
Relocation
He said Dr Du Bois’s decision to relocate to Ghana sowed a seed that reflected his commitment to the development of the African continent.
“The message for me in his coming back home - he was here, died here, he is buried here – that singular act is the sowing of a seed, and we are all the products of that seed. He sowed a seed to let us understand why it is important to unite the African Diaspora with the continent.
“The research is very clear, that the single most important factor is not natural resources, the gold and all that. The single most important factor for the development and progress of nations is your human capital. That is the single most important factor.
“Next year, 2019, will be 400 years of the first documented arrival of slaves from Africa to America, so if human capital is the key to the development and progress of nations and you have 400 years of a loss of human capital, it is bound to have a major impact on us descendants. Therefore, it is very very important to reconnect that human capital that is out there, our brothers and sisters out there in the Diaspora.
“We want quality human capital and that is why our educational systems have to be ramped up, and we have to link up with the human capital that we already have in the Diaspora.
We have to link up and take advantage of that to propel this continent scientifically,” Dr Bawumia stated.
