A Ghanaian Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan Prof. Maxwell Owusu has blamed Ghana's economic woes on corruption. Such corruption he said has its roots in the country’s culture which places high value on money and money-making. He also said that the bane of the economy was the lack of acquisition of knowledge as part of Ghanaian culture. Prof. Owusu, therefore, suggested that Ghanaians eschew the tendency of acquiring knowledge to amass wealth to the detriment of the population and rather embrace it as a culture of consciousness as pertains in some parts of Asia. He was speaking in Accra on Wednesday on the topic "Money and Politics: The Challenge of Democracy in Ghana". The lecture was organised by the Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG) and Joy FM as the 4th in the series of Ghana Speaks Lectures. He said the relationship between money and politics was dynamic. However, Ghana's democracy was gradually becoming plutocratic whereby people would use politics as an avenue to make money while the rest of society was struggling. Prof. Owusu paraphrased from the book "Social Principles and the Democratic State" that if the bulk of the electorate or population was ignorant and if opinion and prejudices could so readily be exploited by organised propaganda and if economic obstacles inhibit criticism, then politicians might not take into account the claims of the people. Ghanaians, he quoted the Economist magazine, are not reading and when they do, they only read three types of books, namely, self-help books, textbooks and religious materials. He stressed the need for people to also read scientific materials. "We are sleeping in a globalised economy which is moving from resource to knowledge base, which requires reading of books", he said, adding that without education the economy should not expect the inflow of very huge investment, no matter how democratic the country became. According to Prof. Owusu, who delved into the political economy of the Ghanaian economy, prior to independence and post- independence, modern democracy had become capitalist, creating some tension between capitalism and democracy although there seemed to be some symbiotic relationship between them. He said that democracy required a certain measure of inequality of conditions, opportunity and access to resources, which should help human beings to meet their basic necessities of life such as good food, potable water, decent housing, good health and high quality education. He said that Ghana, according to the 2008 reports of the World Bank and United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was one of the 35 poorest countries in Africa and the human development indices painted a low literacy rate of 66 per cent and 47 per cent for males and females respectively. "Ghana is sleeping compared to countries like Gabon, Seychelles, South Africa and Kenya, which have either 80 per cent literacy rate or higher", he noted, saying that in the health sector, there was very high risk of water-borne and vector diseases. He said the lowest 10 per cent of Ghana's population had access to only 22 per cent of the household income while the top 10 per cent had access to 33 per cent of the household income and the fact that about 60 per cent of the labour force still engaged in agriculture, after 50 years of independence, was worrisome. Prof. Owusu said democracy alone would not make Ghana develop without the requisite knowledge and skills, especially when Ghana had become one of the top 10 third world countries which export graduates to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries (OECD) with 46 per cent. Source: Daily Graphic