The Gold Coast Development Programme

Abstract

THE programme is the expression of the age-long will of the people: 1 the will to raise their standard of living-in health and housing; in food and water; in enlightenment and education; and to support this programme by improvements in agriculture and industry and trade. This will was strengthened with the birth of nationalism in the early nineteenth century and was a focal point in the aims of all important movements: the Fallti Confederation in the middle l9th century; the Gold Coast Aborigines Society in the late l9th century; the National Congress of British West Africa in the early 1920's, the Gold Coast Youth Conference in the 1930's; the United Gold Coast Convention and the Convention People's Party in the 1940's. This was the will of generations of peopIe extending over a century, expressed with such crystal clearness that when the opportunity came with the general elections in 1951, the Government was able at once to draw up a bold and ambitious programme for total development. Here was an opportunity which released the banked-up energies of the people to fulfil some of their dreams-not only of self-government, but of a fuller and better way of living. So vitally important was this step that the Prime Minister, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, created a Portfolio of Development and, for the last four years, has himself been responsible for Development until, a few months ago, he assigned this task to his second-in-command, the Minister of State, the Hon. Kojo Botsio. The programme itself is a formidable and impressive list of projects of almost every conceivable kindranging from water boreholes in the countiyside or rural areas to the development of a university college; from housing estates to free, universal primary education; from feeder roads to a new port and harbour. It plans for better rural and urball housing; free primary education, the development of a university college and technical institutes; the improvement of health with the expansion of medical services and a better scheme for the provision of food for the towns and water for the outlying villages. Communications are to be improved by telephones and underground cables; transport by the construction of new major roads and feeder roads, and the possibility of a railway to the Northern Territories is already envisaged. In agricultureJ the plan aims at modernising and diversifying crops; and, in industry, it aims at general expansion. The developments were to foreshadow a new age of progresof a golden