'An address on the bridge between India and Ghana'

Speech Excerpts of H.E Mobashar Jawed Akbar, Minister of State for External Affairs, Government of India at the Namaskar Africa Inaugural Session, August 16, 2017, at Accra, Ghana

“We have heard a very intense and exhaustive, but if I may use the word, a very warm introduction to relations between the two countries. There is not only the memory of the past, but there is hope for the future. The past, of course, is with us. This is my first opportunity to be in your great country. But this is certainly not my first opportunity to learn and know about this country. 

“A cooperation built on a very powerful self-conviction, a very powerful form of attitude, but most of all in a very powerful philosophy of self-belief. 

“We do not know who in which era will come to power and when. But it is one of the great fortuitous, happenings, recurrences that both our countries now have leaders who not only have a very strong conviction that there is time for a new vision, but also that this vision is not open-ended in terms of time. It is no longer that things will happen, a decade, two or three decades later. No! It will happen now; it will happen immediately. 

“We use the term transformation now every single day, almost every three hours. But the most important aspect of these remarks is that both the leaders not only have a vision, but they have a route map to a new horizon. It is actually much easier to have a vision than to have a route map. With a vision, you can get lost into nowhere as has happened with many explorers, unless you can convert that into a pragmatic route map.

“Many of our programmes are exactly similar to yours with marginally different names.

“We have ‘Make in India’, you have ‘Industrialization at the door’; it is the same thing because both our countries know that the era of purchases has to be replaced by the era of production. And this era of production has to be Ghana-led and India-led and in the context of our partnership, it has to be Ghana-cum-India. 

“I think the time has come to ponder what precisely this term trade and industry means. Can we have trade without industry? Can we have industry without trade? The answer is that you can!

“We create the industry but somebody else takes the trade. And the time has come to reverse that. We are not going to allow our industry to become somebody else’s profit. It has not only to become the profit for ourselves, nor the profit that is simply going to stay within the hands of the company. This profitability has to go to the people. 

“Growth by itself is no longer sustainable. The first fruits and the largest share of growth must go to those who need it the most, those who are at the bottom of the economic pyramid. And let me tell you how this makes perfect and brilliant business sense for future profitability.

“Once you create economic empowerment amongst the poor, what do you do? You actually create enlarged new markets. So you get on a quantum scale a far bigger market. 

“In the next five years, you may be hoping to increase the size of your market by say 30 million people. They are consuming already, but we want them to be consumers of high-value products. 

“In India, we are looking at a market that is expected to grow by 400 million. You are going to find not only ‘make in India’ but also ‘sell in India’. 

“Why do you think the big multinationals have turned up and started production? I assume that you don’t believe that they are charitable institutions. Why the world’s biggest players in the mobile industry, Foxconn, are now making in India. Very quietly it has become a major hub, why? Because the market is there so why begin from anywhere else? 

“The multinationals have realized that the businessmen in Ghana and India can not only do the same but do it better. 

“When it comes to production, we have lost our voice. When we lost the voice, we lost the brand name. When we lost the brand name, somebody else took our gold, our diamond, our agriculture, our resources and sold them with somebody else’s tag. And the challenge before us for the next five or ten years is to get our brands back. This generation is no longer ready to surrender the space that is legitimately theirs. 

“Let us always remember that nobody comes to conquer a poor country. The cost of conquest has to be worth the return. And we don’t even realize the cost of conquest. In 1948, more than half of the revenue of British Governments annual revenue came only from the taxes. That was the rate of massive exploitation and massive theft. 

“So, rubber has to be synonymous with Malaysia; cotton has to be synonymous with us (India). 

“And there are more worlds to conquer. In February this year, India sent up 104 satellites on a single rocket. Only three of those rockets were for India; the rest were commissioned for other countries like Belgium, France, Israel and the United Arab Emirates. And 96 of them were American. This is because the cost and the quality of operations in India are as good as NASA and infinitely cheaper.

“India became the first country ever to send a mission to Mars and enter its orbit in the very first attempt. However laudable that maybe, the truly astonishing part comes next - the cost of the mission was only 75 million dollars; which was less than the cost of the movie Gravity made on the subject.

“So, we are ready to conquer new worlds – literally, metaphorically. We have a very powerful understanding and meaning of knowledge. Remember, knowledge is the only thing that grows when you give it away. And that is what we are ready to do. 

“We are ready to be friends, we are ready to be partners and we are ready to be equals in this relationship.

“Many people, who come bearing gifts, come loaded with death-traps. We do not have a concept of handing things free. We believe in, “Are you going to sell fish or teach them fishing?”

“We have to turn riches into wealth; from the wealth of the nation into the wealth of the people so that there is development for all and prosperity for all. 

“In our previous discussions, someone said that sometimes the systems of governance demand too much of time. May I end on some bad news – in a democracy, no one has time. So, four years for you and five years for us.” 

“I know some of you live in Ghana. We want all of you to have a third address. Have an address in Ghana; have an address in India, but let us all vow to have an address on the bridge between the two countries.”