The Chief Executive Officer of the Brand Ghana Project, Mr Matthias Akotia has stated that the Brand Ghana office is not a propaganda outfit. He told Joy FM’s Super Morning Show host, Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah, that the objective of the office was not to spin information but to unite the nation around common values aimed at establishing the country’s unique identity. In a continent where problems and challenges in one country were ascribed to all other countries, Ghana, he maintained needed to focus on, and build a brand that will set it apart from other countries in order to insulate it from the oft generalizations that Africa is one country whose characteristics are political instability, debilitating poverty, diseases, squalor and misery. “If (we) don’t stand for something differentiated from Africa, (we) are in trouble, we will suffer for it,” because in Europe and the Americas Africa is seen as one country and, “they think about African in terms of disease, poverty, corruption, and all the negatives, meanwhile people’s daily struggles for emancipation are being” ignored, he emphasised. Mr Akotia noted that while Ghanaians were known for their hospitality, that value and other positive ones such as the resilience and tenacity of the people ought to be built into the national consciousness of all the citizens. He said the energies of the people cannot be harnessed to achieve a single purposeful objective if that objective was not well defined in the first place. Lauding the goal of attaining middle income status by 2015 (2020), he said, “that requires that we are united by a vision and we have shared values to drive us to achieve it. That is why it is so important that Ghana has a country branding programme.” Giving further justification for the establishment of the office which some argued was redundant, the Brand Ghana boss said global competitiveness makes it imperative for Ghana to establish a compelling brand name for herself. “You must have a clear strategy to win.” He added that his outfit aimed “to support the creation of the kind of reality that will leverage the vision and the competitive identity that we have as a nation. It is important that we create it, it must be a conscious move and we should have the organisation to begin talking about it which is why Brand Ghana has been set up.” Story by Malik Abass Daabu/Myjoyonline.com/Ghana