In a rather ambitious demonstration of his vision for the Ashanti Region, Presidential hopeful and leader for the New Force, Nana Kwame Bediako is promising to extend the sea from Ghana’s coast to the land locked region.
According to the business magnate affectionately called Freedom Jacob Caesar or Cheddar, this forms part of his ambition to open up Ghana’s Eastern and Western Corridors to facilitate trade.
Speaking in an interview on Abusua FM in Kumasi, Bediako insisted he has travelled wide and seen countries extend the reach of their maritime transport routs, inland.
“I have travelled far and wide. I have seen many countries do that. Even Dubai which was a typical desert now has the sea. That is the kind of vision I have for the Ashanti Region. When we dredge the sea to the region, ships can dock in Kumasi,” he explained.
Nana Kwame Bediako wondered why people would still be carting individual containers by road when the sea could be a faster and more efficient means of importing and exporting goods to and from the Ashanti Region.
“We are in the year 2024. This is not a time people will be driving containers one by one from the Tema Harbour to Kumasi over a six hour journey by road. By the time one container gets here, half of its content are either broken or gone bad. If you had the rails or sea, in one hour five hundred containers will be here. You can also ship out 500 containers in the same fashion.
I want to open up the East and Western Corridor infrastructure; I want to build power stations;; energy stations; I want to connect the gas; I want to create industries; bring technology,” he added.
“We must build our own mobile phones and laptops. We have the plastics here. The same lithium we are selling to the Chinese can be harnessed to our own benefit,” Cheddar challenged.
He indicated that industrialization has been one of his trump cards for over a decade culminating into an industrial park he had named Petronia.
He called for elderly citizens to recognize that founders of Facebook, Apple and Microsoft all started as youth in their tender ages but received the needed support and encouragement to transform their ideas into global giants making global impact and large revenues.
Freedom Jacob Caesar is in the Ashanti Region for a five day visit as part of his nationwide tour which he has dabbed a listening tour.
The tour is to afford him the opportunity to listen to the visions, aspirations and desires of the ordinary Ghanaian to inform his manifesto for December’s national election.