Former Executive Vice President of Unilever, Yaw Nsarkoh, has said that Ghana has yet to show the world that the black man is capable of running his own affairs as late former President Kwame Nkrumah said in the speech he delivered when the nation attained independence in 1957.

Speaking on PM Express on JoyNews, he said that many Ghanaians had great expectations in the country following independence and assumed that the country would be one of the enviable states in the world today.

But, Mr Nsarkoh believes that the country is yet to deliver on that mandate expressing disappointment in the coup d’ etats that took place after independence.

“I do know that when Kwame Nkrumah stood at the old polo grounds and he said that ‘the black man must show to the world that he’s capable of running his own affairs’, I do not believe that Ghana in 2023 today fulfils that brief. If there’s somebody who believes that it does, I’d like to see the person put up his hand.”

“I’ve spoken to many people, some of them were students of that generation, and some of them were young people who were working. They’ve seen Ghana unfold and I ask them all the time, is this what you expected and almost universally, the answer is no. We have not delivered on that.”

Mr Nsarkoh noted that Ghana has a chance to make things right and learn from the mistakes of the past.

He stated that “The choice we have is to say, do we sit down and mourn the past, mourn expectations that have not been delivered or do we learn from those and say to ourselves that we will recreate the future? The Ghanaian is a human being. If you’re a human being, then you can learn from your mistakes.”

Mr Nsarkoh added that to ensure that Ghana stays on the path of democracy there needs to be conversation geered towards addressing the bad governance and cracks today.

“I know that if you allow misgovernance, you create spaces for a populist. It is not necessarily even a military populist. You create spaces for a populist to emerge. So we must be as concerned about good governance as we are about condemning military coups and so on and so forth.”