Education Quote by John Agyekum Kufuor

“Mainstream” is doing a lot of diplomatic work here. Kufuor isn’t praising education as self-cultivation; he’s pitching it as Africa’s entry ticket into an economic system whose gates are already staffed, whose rules are already written, and whose benefits are unevenly distributed. As a statesman who led Ghana during a period of liberalization and donor-facing reform, he frames higher education as infrastructure for competitiveness: the thing that turns a young population into human capital, makes states legible to investors, and converts mineral-and-agriculture economies into knowledge economies.

The intent is strategic reassurance. To domestic audiences, it’s a promise that universities can be ladders rather than luxury goods: a pathway to jobs, mobility, and national relevance. To international audiences, it signals alignment with the consensus language of the early 2000s: globalization is inevitable, so policy should focus on “capacity,” “skills,” and “integration” rather than resistance. That’s why the sentence avoids antagonists. No mention of trade asymmetries, debt, brain drain, or the way “mainstream” can mean assimilation into someone else’s current.

The subtext is a wager: that higher education can reconcile two competing anxieties at once - Africa being left behind, and Africa being included only as a market or a labor pool. It’s also a quiet argument about governance. Universities don’t just produce engineers; they produce administrators, journalists, and critics. In that sense, Kufuor is selling education as both economic strategy and statecraft: the soft power that makes globalization less something that happens to Africa and more something Africa can negotiate.