Madam Akosua Frema Osei-Opare in a handshake with Mr. Harper at the function
Ghana’s democracy has been ranked Africa’s best by a former Canadian Prime Minister and Chairman of the International Democratic Union (IDU), Stephen Harper.
While delivering a keynote address at a high-notched public lecture series on Governance in Africa last Wednesday at the University of Ghana Cedi Conference Centre on the theme “Democracy and Geo-Politics; a Global Perspective on the Changing Dynamics of the International Order,” he said Ghana has since the start of the Fourth Republic has become a different and better kind of model for Africa, keeping pace with her motto of Freedom and Justice.
Ghana, he went on, was at the forefront of advancing the concept of free election, rule of law, free trade, market oriented growth and continental free trade.
The lecture was organised by the Young Democrat Union of Africa (YDUA), the youth wing of the Democrat Union of Africa (DUA) under the IDU in partnership with the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, a German development foundation and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), a member of the IDU.
In attendance were leaders and members of the YDUA and UDA from Cote d’Ivoire, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Morocco, Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Ghana, leaders of the IDU, members of the diplomatic corps, some national executives of the NPP and some youth groups.
The IDU is an alliance of all centre-right political parties in the world of which the NPP is a member.
The former Prime Minister and the Chief of Staff, Madam Akosua Frema Osei-Opare were both honoured for their various contributions to the growth of the YDUA.
They were presented with plaques while Mr. Harper was decorated with a Kente cloth.
He urged the youth not to subscribe to the current wave of coup d’états that had swept through the sub-region, but to continue to uphold the ideals and principles of democracy to ensure personal freedoms, free expression, rule of law among others that were the basis of economic development.