Vice President John Mahama has predicted a bright future for Ghana, saying the nation will continue to play a vanguard role and remain an inspiration for the rest of the African continent expected to give the world the next generation of emerging economies. Speaking on New York based WBAI 99.5FM’s Wake Up Call to shed more light on his feature article on the occasion of Ghana’s 54th Independence Anniversary, John Mahama traced the history of Ghana’s patchy road from Independence through coup d’etats to democracy, saying constitutional governance has taken hold and with a vibrant media fearless to keep governments on their toes, the sky is the limit. He said economic wise, even though progress has been slow in getting ECOWAS to function properly to expedite trade and economic integration, it certainly is the way to go and pledged Ghana’s commitment to help grow the sub-regional body. “I guess that Ghana’s destiny is tied into the sub-region in which it’s located and the regional economic communities; we have five of them in Africa and the sub-regional organization that Ghana belongs to is the ECOWAS. Now, we have signed several ECOWAS protocols and treaties that are supposed to make us move on to a common market and to create a free trade zone. Unfortunately progress has been a bit slow but in spite of the establishment of those protocols I think that because of this Francophone/Anglophone divide there have been some obstacles on the way of creating a proper sub-regional market where all the countries will be able to leverage their strengths in a competitive market and we will continue to work towards removing all these obstacles.” John Mahama said in spite of the challenges, there is a determination to advance the cause of integration and that “Ghana believes that that is the way to go. We will continue to work for it and I guess that eventually when we have been able to consolidate the regional economic communities then we should be able to create a united Africa which leverages all the strengths of the countries on the continent and allows people to share our economic strengths with each other.” Throwing light on his optimism that Africa will emerge the world’s next block of development, Vice President John Mahama said there are clear signs why this is so. “I guess that the next generation of emerging countries are going to come from Africa because we are facing the challenges and we are trying to kick start our economies. It is expected that Ghana is going to grow at about 13 percent this year and subsequently grow at an average of between 8 and 10 percent per year which is quite a high growth rate and so we expect that the next generation of emerging countries are going to come out of Africa.” Story by Myjoyonline.com/Ghana