While speaking at a thanksgiving service in Accra on Friday, as part of a year-long celebration of the 75th anniversary of the University of Ghana (UG), Legon, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo appealed to higher educational institutions to focus their research on addressing social challenges facing the country.
The President explained that it was important for research institutions to find new and effective ways to cooperate with industry and the corporate world to undertake high-quality strategic research to address societal and economic challenges.
After saying this, he stated that the UG had consistently delivered on its objective of providing world-class human assets and capacities to meet Ghana’s development needs and that the diversity of UG’s research efforts and output in various disciplines, including social sciences, law, natural sciences, medicine, agriculture, environment, and energy, have been internationally-acclaimed.
The President, however, stressed that UG must broaden its scope by undertaking and implementing research that provided information and capabilities on which society could rely to help the country compete successfully on the global arena.
We think the research institutions are better placed to analyse the admonition President Akufo-Addo has given them and act appropriately.
On our side, we get the impression that the institutions of higher learning are not undertaking the relevant research and so must be reminded to toe the “right path”.
But we know that these institutions have undertaken various research works whose findings continue to gather dust because the state called Ghana does not value the efforts made by these institutions.
Maybe this is the reason why the state does not want to support such efforts.
Over the years, institutions of higher learning in the country have been fighting successive governments over a number of issues, including research allowance.
It will be recalled that on January 10, last year, for instance, the President of the of the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG), University of Ghana Chapter, Dr Samuel Nkumbaan, raised issues against the amount given to lecturers as research allowance for the entire year.
He specifically asked on an Accra-based radio station the question, “GH¢1500 for a whole year as research allowance?” and added that “If we are not serious with tertiary education, let’s just leave and pursue galamsey or something else.”
Elsewhere enough money is given to researchers to undertake research into even what can be unimaginable in Ghana.
Without any dispute, research expands the frontiers of knowledge and helps in solving problems relating to life in general and meet needs in health, technology, education, agriculture and all other fields one can imagine.
For this reason, countries that value the benefits of research pump money into it and enjoy its priceless dividends.
To this end, we support President Akufo-Addo’s promise to the University of Ghana that, “My government fully supports and shares your vision of becoming a research-intensive university, and we will do everything we can to assist you in realising it.”
We think that promise must be extended to, at least, all the public universities in the country for them to, among other works, undertake country-specific works such as “Why Ghanaians do not want to pay tax”; Why the district assemblies cannot check haphazard community development”; “Why the Ghanaian generally finds it difficult to be law-abiding”; and “Why Ghanaian politicians mostly ignore the problems affecting the masses and seek their parochial interests”.
We believe the finding will be interesting and the implementation of the recommendations would change the status quo and take the country’s development forward.
