Graphic Dialogue opens

Story: Albert K. Salia
THE second Daily Graphic Governance Dialogue began in Accra yesterday with a reminder that an integrated sub-regional market may help attract the investment needed for growth.
Delivering the keynote address at the opening ceremony, a renowned economist and investment consultant, Mr Kwame Pianim, made it clear that “if regional integration is one of the means of accelerating economic growth, then accelerating regional integration will help unleash the growth potential of the economies of the continent”.
He said realising the African renaissance dream to help improve living conditions in Africa must, therefore, be firmly anchored on the success that “we achieve in accelerating the pace of regional integration across Africa”.
The theme for the two-day dialogue is “Accelerating Regional Integration for Wealth Creation and Sustainable Development”.
It was organised by the Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL) and sponsored by Finatrade Group and the Ghana Commercial Bank.
It was aimed at identifying strategic goals, objectives and actions to facilitate an effective common market within the ECOWAS sub-region, identify barriers to attracting investment, explore mechanisms for promoting investment and examine the lessons of the European Union with a view to using them as a guide to the West African integration process, among other issues.
The Daily Graphic Governance Dialogue was instituted in 2006 with the objective of providing a platform to highlight governance issues in Africa to help improve the quality of life of its people.
Mr Pianim, who is also the Chairman of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC), noted that since the beginning of the 21st Century, African economies had been out-performing other regions in terms of economic growth.
That, he said, was due partly to economic reforms that were being undertaken but largely to the commodity boom.
He pointed out, however, that sustainable development could not be built on commodity booms, especially if the windfall gains were not saved for rainy??????? days or used to create wealth creation infrastructure or investments that enhanced productivity.
“There is growing evidence that an increasing number of African countries have built sound and relative social and macro-economic infrastructure that have put our economies on an upward trajectory for accelerated growth,” he said.
Mr Pianim, who is also Chief Executive Officer of New World Investments, said Ghana was one of those reforming nations that were now on the verge of such a breakthrough.
He, however, said Ghana could perform the challenging feat only as a member of a large economic space such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
He said while Nigeria, an economy with 140 million people, might not need ECOWAS, Ghana, with its 22 million people and a purchasing power of less than $15 billion, needed the ECOWAS fold to create accelerated and sustainable growth and development, saying that “accelerating the sub-regional integration process will, therefore, help provide a fillip to Ghana’s accelerated growth agenda”.
Mr Pianim said an accelerated regional integration would move the countries of the sub-region faster in attaining their individual goals of improving the quality of life for their nations if they pooled their resources within an integrated sub-region.
He said the trend in the world now was the formation of regional groupings where nations gave up part of their sovereign powers in order to benefit from the economies of the larger groups.
Comparing some of the regional blocs to ECOWAS, he said the ASEAN Group were 10 in number and with an estimated population of about 554 million and a purchasing power of more than $2,172 billion, NAFTA included three members having 430 million people and a purchasing power of $15,279 billion, and the European Union, made up of 27 members, had a population of 496 million and a purchasing power of $12,025 billion while ECOWAS, comprising 15 members with an estimated population of 252 million, had a purchasing power of $343 billion.
“Giving the size of most of the 15 member countries, there is no doubt that some form of economic collaboration might be useful and help accelerate economic development. All has less than 25 million people with only Nigeria having an estimated 140 million people,” he said.
Nonetheless, Mr Pianim said, while sub-regional integration, however defined and structured, would help economic development of its members, there was the need to sequence the process carefully.
He said it was also important that mechanisms be put in place for shared growth and development, otherwise “integration, far from helping growth, may actually impede development of some members”.
Mr Pianim said integration would demand special efforts to get every member country feel included and challenged and a beneficiary of the process, saying that “integration cannot be left to market forces only”.
He said although the objective of the Dialogue was to help identify the challenges and the strategic goals, as well as action plans to accelerate the integration efforts of the sub-region, there was also the need to identify some of the economic and financial infrastructure that needed to be put in place to facilitate the eventual attainment of the integration objective.
He commended the Graphic Communications Group Limited for creating the innovative and policy-making enhancing platform as part of its corporate governance and social responsibility activities.
He noted that the efforts of the media in Africa, supported by the international community, had helped with the emergence of a new breed of political leadership.
Mr Pianim said the main benefit of the rule of law and good governance was to empower people to question how they were ruled and to participate in policy debate.
He made it clear that attaining widespread and broad-based development that involved building a middle class economy required the institution of full personal freedoms in order to unleash the innovative talents of the people.
“For us in the sub-region, international perception about security and rule of law is a shared public good and is thus non-divisible to a large extent,” he added.
“Rule of law, safety of investment and a peaceful and business friendly sub-regional environment is a public good we must encourage and foster for our general good, if we are to attract a fair share of the one trillion dollars of global capital flows to help build our sub-region,” Mr Pianim added.