Education will be a priority not just on paper but by action if the next government is formed by the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), the party’s 2012 presidential candidate Nana Akufo-Addo has said. Ghana’s hopes of fast-tracking its development and creating opportunities for her people would remain a particularly seductive illusion if the country’s educational system remains moribund and mass failures are recorded yearly, especially at the basic level, he insisted. “We are not going to be able to make the big leap for development that all of us in this country are seeking if we do not tackle the question of skills and education for the mass of our people; we are not going to be able to develop a modern society if 50 per cent of the adult population is illiterate – you can’t do it,” he told Joy FM’s Super Morning Show host Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah Friday. Ghana, he warned, stands the risk of falling into the abyss of social and political crises and their concomitant repercussions – as is the case in some African countries - if the education system is not invested in to produce a society of young progressive minded people who have hopes and the opportunity to pursue their dreams. The urgent action is needed here; political leaders cannot continue to pay lip service to the sector, he added. According to Nana Addo, majority of the country’s youth terminated their education at the Basic Education Certificate Examination – a level he believes cannot equip them with the necessary tools and skills to earn a better standard of living. Under the circumstance, large numbers of young people were joining an already large pool of young unemployed people who are a danger to the nation’s stability, growth and development, he noted. Instead, the termination point should be at least the Senior High School level, he advocated. To negotiate the far-too-often-cited reason why the education sector is in its current state – limited resources - the NPP flag-bearer said the state must devote a certain percentage of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to education, stressing it was not an impossible thing to do. “I believe sincerely that if there is a country in this part of the world in so-called black Africa that has the ingredients for making that transition from poverty to prosperity, it is Ghana, especially now that we have a democratic system of government that seems to have the allegiance and the attachment of the mass of our people, I think we have the constitutional and political framework to address the questions of development,” Nana Addo said with a caveat, “but this matter of education and promoting skills and thereby jobs…must be the central feature [of every government].”