“We do not yield to despair; rather, we embrace the values of our own past and the religions and faiths we pursue and formulate the types of solutions and situations that best help us all achieve our common good,” he said.
Cardinal Turkson went on to emphasize that the “pursuit of the common good requires regulations,” without which the common good “fails to serve the needs of the commons.”
“Here in Ghana, we live on a land with many endowments and riches, for which we prayed again this morning and thanked God. The wealth of this land, with everything that exists here, belongs to Ghanaians; therefore, it must serve the common needs and the common purpose of all of us,” he stated.
The Cardinal cautioned against letting “individual interests and individual gains to cause negatives externalities” for the people of God in Ghana.
“This has happened before, in Austria, in the Alps; they created the expression, ‘the tragedy of the commons,’” he said, explaining that “the tragedy of the commons is when people who depend on a common property abuse it to the point that the property fails to serve the needs of everybody in the society.”
He reminded the people of God in Ghana that the country’s true transformation lies not solely in the hands of leadership, but within the conscience and character of every citizen. “The transformation of this land depends on us,” he said, adding that the task cannot be left to “the president with all the good intentions that he may have.”
He continued, “Whatever vision of Ghana we have gathered here to express, we must recognize that it is not enough to simply formulate and articulate a vision; we must also determine our own place within that vision.”
For him, the West African nation requires “Ghanaians who are virtuous, who develop virtue and are led by virtue to develop a fulcrum on which their own lives would balance on a virtuous conduct and virtuous positions.”
In the absence of virtue, he warned, “greed will dominate this land and when greed dominates this land there will be a lot of negative externalities to be borne by all of us.”
He decried unregulated exploitation of natural resources, adding that environmental degradation is an outcome of unchecked greed already affecting the country. “Our rivers no longer give prawns and shrimps. Our church hospital in the middle part of this country talks about increasing children born with deformities because of exposure to cyanide and mercury,” Cardinal Turkson lamented.
