Juliet Asante writes open letter to President Akufo-Addo over opening of Creative Arts School

Standing on all protocols, your excellency, Mr President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, we take the opportunity to say thank you for your vision for this project.

To realize a project like this during your Presidency leaves a very strong legacy for the future.

They say that the future of work lies with the creative and innovative spirit even as Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes over the world.

When the world is occupied with taking jobs from humans and giving it to machines, we in Africa will have over two billion mouths to feed and over one billion young muscles to employ.

How will we achieve this?

This, Mr President, is where your legacy steps in.

Change is happening so fast, that one must constantly be in the mode of innovation and creativity to stay afloat.

Africa has to deal with the population boom, a young population, unemployment and so on. The only way to deal is to produce a solution-focused Ghanaian; a Ghanaian who comes out of school seeing opportunities in the many problems around us and can innovatively create a solution and make it a business and also employ other Ghanaians.

So what do we see with the Creative Arts school?

We see a Ghanaian who is a critical thinker, can see the problems around them and think about solutions right here.

In an era where we are preaching Ghana Beyond Aid and made-in-Ghana, it is time to nurture the Ghanaian who can create the beautiful world he or she imagines in whichever profession he or she imagines.

Mr President, we cannot stop here. We need to prepare the ecosystem for this new Ghanaian to prosper in this new era of the Africa continental free trade area.

We in the creative space call on you Mr President to make the revolution of the space a priority in the next year. We call on you to help nurture and consolidate the cultural revolution that is already taking place.

A Ghana that is well branded and standing tall on the continent. A Ghanaian who knows his own identity, accepts and takes pride in his uniqueness even in the global landscape.

A Ghanaian who loves his music, cherishes her art, tells her stories and invites the world in to sample her goodies from hardworking hands. We are beautiful people, but who will tell our stories and sell it? Who will show the world what we have got and continue to inspire the next generation to think without barriers?

The four walls of a building does not make a school.

We must first school our minds to appreciate the beautiful things in life and to aspire to it and the way we do that is the Creative Arts school.

We need to get rid of the stigma associated with being a creative person. We need to invest in the creative sector unapologetically Mr President.

We hereby call on Government to conduct an expansive survey into the contribution of the creative sector to jobs creation, to employment, to branding.

We cannot have a school like this and watch 60% foreign content on our TV stations for instance, and so the policy on local content needs to be passed to create the opportunities for local businesses to create content that is relevant to who we are as a people and where we want to go.

We, of course, can not take away all foreign content, but let’s remember that anytime we prioritize foreign content on our channels, we are taking away jobs from the individual who comes to this school and the many others who could be creating business and employing local expertise.

As we invest in the Creative Arts school, we should remember that we cannot put up this school and be showing the world bad films with no funding that depict us poorly. We can not have this school and have our music dying and overtaken by our neighbours. Your excellency, we encourage you to finish the fine job you have started.

Today, we say thank you to God Almighty for making this day possible.

To the honourable Minister of Education, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh and his entire team and staff at the Ministry and all relevant stakeholders, thank you for thinking into this space.

As a proud member of the committee that worked on this project, let me share with you a little bit of our guiding principles.

Art permeates life. Everything that comes from the human, can be seen through the lens of Art and judged accordingly for God created us and ordered us to go and create.

Art is culture and in many schools around the world, a focus on Arts has produced better school results and we know for a fact that creativity spurs on entrepreneurial abilities.

Creativity is not connected to profession creativity is a mindset. Everyone can be creative. From the doctor to the carpenter to the farmer.

How do we come up with the most creative solutions to problems in Ghana?

On behalf of all my colleagues on the committee that has been working tirelessly under the direct leadership of the Deputy Minister of Education, Dr Adutwum and Mrs Mina Asamoah, on behalf of the entire creative sector family in Ghana, on behalf of all Ghanaians, we express our excitement at this development and wait to see how the dots connect in the overall plan.

Again on behalf of the creative sector and all Ghanaians, we appreciate the thought leadership this has demonstrated in this project and we look forward to welcoming the new and improved Ghanaian who understands the power we hold to shape our lives with innovation at the forefront of our solutions.

Thank you and God bless you Mr President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and God bless our dear country, Ghana.

Thank you.