Great piece Christiane. This is exactly the stories to open the eyes of the country as we endeavor to avoid Nigeria's mistakes.

Stephen, and these are the men and women you should be writing about. Indigenous Ghanaians and Africans taking ownership of their own and peoples' futures. These are the stories that make me very proud as an African. Stories of our people indicating that, maybe. now a new generation of Africans are taking the inititiatives to become real participants in their countries' resource exploration rather than mere passive bystanders.

Until Africans such as Ebow roll up their sleeves and get down to work on solving the continents' problems, no amount of outside INITIATIVES will contribute to alleviating the continents problems of "resource curse", brain drain, massive unemployment and perpectual underdevelopment. This has been done in Indonesia and other far Eastern countries!

My hats up to you brother Ebow!

(rtd) Eng. Ahmed Finoh, MPA

 

 

Christiane:

Ofcourse and ofcourse not!

Ofcourse, the oil exploration will bring jobs to Ghana and particularly to the local region. There will be a trickle down impact of the company's operations: local business people and others will find income producing activities such as vegetable and food production to feed the myriad of employees brought in by the company; local house owners will realize more for rental properties. And so on.

And ofcourse not because the local region is not expected to immediately produce marine engineers, underwater welders and other specialized trades. Those would have to be recruited outside Sekondi and even beyound Ghana. But with time, locals and Ghanaians will ease into those highly- skilled technical positions.

I worked for a mining company fresh out of engineering college in West Africa. But to tell you the truth,we were the first bunch of locally graduated engineering kids. The company since its inception obtained its skilled workforce first from abroad then began taking high school graduates and training them both in the country and overseas specifically for skills needed by the company. This was after the company realized that it can obtain the same production from local employees when well trained as the very expensive expatriate employees.

You see, as I mentioned previously, companies are SMART. After all, they are into business to make profit. Companies are not particularly into saving countries or doing Godly work, except when it affects their bottomlines. If it does, that's when you see them paying attention to corporate social responsibilities, transparencies, pacification of some primitive tribes, care for the little creeters and other godly concerns for the locals and the environment.

Thanks, Christiane, and keep us enlightened with the good work you and others GOXIANS are doing on the behalf of people without "voices."

Eng. Ahmed Finoh, MPA

Durham, NC /USA