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The Minority Leader, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, has stated that the principles of the Danquah-Dombo-Busia tradition, which revolves around the individual, are not relics of the past but urgencies the country needs to overcome its challenges into the future.
He said individual freedom —the freedom to think, to create, to own, and to build — was the engine of adaptation, adding that while no central planner could anticipate the specific skills and innovations that Ghana would need to thrive in the next decade, only free individuals, operating within well-built institutions, could generate that kind of adaptive capacity.
“The rule of law and constitutional governance, the foundation that Danquah fought for from his first days as a lawyer, are the preconditions for sustainable investment. No business builds where contracts cannot be enforced. No entrepreneur invests where property can be taken without legal protection.”
“The institutions that protect liberty also protect prosperity. And the vision of the property-owning democracy, a Ghana in which every citizen has a real stake in the national story, addresses the central challenge of our time,” Mr Afenyo-Markin stressed in a public lecture in Accra last Monday.
Organised by the Institute of Economic Research and Public Policy, it was on the theme, “The Centre-Right impact on Ghana’s Political Landscape”.
Former President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo (2nd from right) with Alexander Afenyo-Markin (2nd from left)
Chaired by Hackman-Owusu-Agyemang, who is also the Chairman of the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) Council of Elders, it was attended by the bigwigs of the NPP from the national executive to members of the Council of Elders.
Notable among them were former President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo; former Speaker of Parliament, Aaron Mike Oquaye; the Deputy Minority Leader, Patricia Appiagyei; the General Secretary of the NPP, Justin Kodua Frimpong, students and the public.
Last Monday’s lecture traced the three main political ideologies and persuasions the country had experienced, during which the Minority Leader touched on what, in his estimation, were the strengths and weaknesses.
Mr Afenyo-Markin said it was important for the Kufuor and Akufo-Addo administrations to embark on far-reaching social interventions that had since redefined the foundation and the future of the country, explaining that a developed country with broad access to education, health care and economic infrastructure could argue about how much the state should step back and let the market run.
That argument has its place in those contexts, even if it is contested.
He said in Ghana, markets could not function efficiently when large sections of the population lack access to basic education.
“The social interventions of the Kufuor and Akufo-Addo administrations were not departures from the centre-right tradition.
They were the application of that tradition to the real conditions of a developing economy.
They removed the barriers that prevented ordinary Ghanaians from accessing the market.
They built the human capital without which market participation is impossible.
They extended the infrastructure of opportunity to those whom the market, in its current form, could not reach.
This is not a contradiction.”
He described those social intervention policies as the most coherent expression of the tradition's core belief: that human beings, given the conditions to develop their capabilities and exercise their freedom, will generate prosperity that spreads outward.
“You cannot have a competitive labour market when workers are chronically ill.
You cannot have a dynamic business class when talented children are excluded from secondary school because of fees.
You cannot have functioning property rights when people lack a recognised legal identity,” Mr Afenyo-Markin stated.
He also enumerated a long list of similar interventions by the Akufo-Addo administration.
The Minority Leader stressed that the property-owning ideology of the Danquah-Dombo-Busia Centre-right tradition on which the NPP was founded promoted small businesses and educated children whose lives were changed by the social interventions of the tradition.
He said the party was to liberate the energies of the people for the growth of a property-owning democracy with right to life, freedom and justice, as principles to which government and laws of the land should be dedicated in order specifically to enrich life, property and liberty of each and every citizen.”
The Minority Leader sought to correct the impression that the tradition was meant for the elite or the educated few.
Rather, it was built for the farmer, the fisherman in Cape Coast, the market woman in Kumasi, who hitherto had no real place in its story.
"I want to face that charge directly today.
Not defensively.
Not with anger. But with evidence, with history, and with truth.
Because here is what I believe.
I believe that a tradition is not judged by where it comes from.
It is judged by where it is going. It is not judged by the social class of its founders.
It is judged by the direction of its policies,” he said.
