President J. A. Kufuor on Wednesday took advantage of his last and final opportunity at the United Nations General Assembly to market Ghana on the international platform, saying the story of Ghana's impressive development under his leadership had vindicated the principle that development in freedom was feasible and achievable. Trumpeting Ghana's development experience to an august audience at the general debate of the General Assembly, the President said Ghana's story had shown that accelerated national development could go hand in hand with good governance and democracy. Recounting the story, President Kufuor said he was sworn into office on a liberal democratic Constitution with the same strong streak of morality as contained in the United Nations Charter that recognised the centrality of man in all endeavours. Unfortunately, he said, he inherited a bad economy, a situation that compelled the country to sign up for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative to pave the way for the government to access funds for various projects of reconstruction for which credit lines were difficult to come by. With national determination and great discipline, he said, the country was able to achieve the HlPC completion point in record time to earn debt forgiveness of about $8 billion from bilateral and multilateral creditors. That success led to increased inflows of domestic and foreign investments which enabled the government to launch, among other social services, the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE), the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), as well as substantial developments in both second-cycle and tertiary level education, he stated. While pursuing social services, he said, heavy investments were also being made in infrastructure in the areas of transportation, energy and telecommunication in anticipation of the accelerated growth of the economy. In the meantime, President Kufuor said, a process to modernise the country's agriculture through mechanisation had commenced to improve the welfare of the more than 60 per cent of the society who were rural and depended on the sector for their livelihood. By those policies, among others, the President said the nation was making strides in attaining its ambitious vision of a middle income status by 2015, which was also the date set for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). He said the impressive developments had been crowned by the discovery of oil in commercial quantities, which the government had determined to make a blessing for the whole nation rather than a curse. In the international arena, President Kufuor commended the UN Secretary-General for his tangible resolve to use his tenure to give accountable leadership to the world body and asked the international community to give sympathetic hearing to the UN chief's call for increased support for the restructuring and streamlining of the personnel of the UN to ensure more flexible, efficient and effective tackling of global challenges. He said in spite of challenges such as climate change, rising crude oil prices, turbulence in the financial markets and massive drug trafficking confronting the world now, there were tremendous opportunities such as ICT, dramatic feats in engineering and bioscience technologies to surmount those difficulties. President Kufuor said the difficulty now was for the world to curb self-centredness, greed, bigotry and petty• inhumanities to allow for the sharing of the outcome of the hunlan discoveries and creativity. Turning his attention to developments in Africa, President Kufuor observed that the continent had registered dramatic improvements in the last decade, citing the African Union's Peer Review Mechanism and the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) as some of the continent's flagship programmes. Expressing appreciation to Africa's development partners, President Kufuor said there was still room for improvement, especially in the continent's effort to achieve the MDGs.