PROFESSIONAL POLITICIANS MUST NOT BE TOLERATED-ODURO

A senior citizen, Prof Kwabena Konadu Oduro, has advocated for a political arrangement in which any person solely claiming politics as his or her only profession would not be given the mandate by people to lead.
He said the cause of tension and violence in the political arena could be attributed to many people calling themselves politicians and had no other claim to any profession than politics.
“Currently in Ghana, many people calling themselves politicians had no other claim to any profession than politics and that was the cause of tension and violence as such people believed if they did not win political power then that was the end for them,” he told the Daily Graphic in an interview.
Prof Oduro, who is the Chairman of the Office of Accountability (OA), was sharing his personal views on the elections insisted “if one’s claim to a profession was only in politics then the person was not the right material for political leadership.”
He said the claim by some people that they were professional politicians had brought in its wake heated political atmosphere, in which all Ghanaians were “politicking wrongly.”
“Some Ghanaians were inciting violence in a bid to have the upper hand in their campaigns,” he added.
He proposed that time was up to institute a political system that would ban anyone identified for inciting violence from further participation in any political activity.
On the country’s oil finds, Prof Oduro, who is a bio chemist by profession , suggested the use of funds accruing from the oil into investments in solar energy.
He said although the oil was a non renewable source, solar was not.
Outlining how the country could go about the investment in solar energy, he suggested the use the country’s bauxite for the production of solar panels that would also create jobs.
These would then be deployed in the districts for every household in the rural area to benefit from this source of energy.
He said the traditional sources of the country’s energy like the Akosombo Hydro Electric Plant could be channelled into industrial use while the deployment of solar energy is built up from the rural areas to the urban until every household in Ghana was covered.
He said such an action would ensure that long before the last oil was drawn out, the country would have a solid energy investment in solar energy which was sure to be the last source of energy to flicker out.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2008, PG 17