ON the matter of Ghana's post-COVID-19 agenda of local production and self reliance: There are huge gaps in education, skills and competence to be filled.

We need a serious dialogue and culture change. Production is a technical thing. UG for example has more students in business admin than in the Sciences, Agric and Engineering combined. Even in Agric majority of the students are in Agric economics. We cannot do any serious production with such propensity of the idle end of the economic system? Our educational system should 80% technical and 20% non-technical. Right now we have it twisted and wrong. The thing also is that the technical folks can easy re-tool for not technical roles when need be but the reverse in not quite that simple. This is why China took all the production jobs, they study science and engineering, they go abroad to study science and engineering. The move for local production can go only as far as the sophistication and efficiency of our technical competence. The extra 20% is overall, people who can both. I will even do 100% technical. Production engineer by week day, top musician on weekends. We need to tackle this development thing with brut force. The 500 years of deficit cannot be imported. Minds that appreciate and operates in the arts and the sciences are trainable. We just need a comprehensive system of learning for our kids and they will crack it. In this difficult era we are in, to be non-technical is to severely handicapped. They can do top engineers and creative artists at the same time. What most people say is that, they want a course that will help them find a job readily. This is clearly a defeatist approach. People should and should be made to focus on courses that helps society tackle it's biggest problems. Someone asked of Shakespeare, but his era is passed. Besides if he lived in second world war Britain, he would have enlisted in the army as a mechanic. And he would have done his writings during retirement. And his books would have still been famous years after his passing. Yes Shakespeare could have been a mechanic and also writer, and Mark Twain could have been a food processor and a philosopher. There is never an either/or situations in times of crisis.

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