Denial Most Insincere

President John Mahama
The ship of state is sinking even as the Captain, with his binoculars, stands on the bridge smiling broadly. The verity is that the vessel is listing dangerously but the Captain, in an obscene spate of denial, feigns ignorance of the reality or is just being pretentious.

That is the rueful situation in Ghana: the economy is in tatters but the man at the helm gives the all-clear sign and expects the citizenry to smile in satisfaction when they are not oblivious of the reality.

Considering the undeniable reality, we can only manage wry smiles, if at all. When some of us do not know when our next depreciated salaries would hit our accounts, need we be pretentious under the circumstances and clap our hands for the President or shower undeserving plaudits on him?

Even in the face of such stark reality of the country's government-inflicted fiscal health, our President dismisses our fears as mere pessimism after poking fun at what for him is our collective amnesia.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reality is being downplayed by the President in a manner which prompts us to question his state of sincerity and alertness.

Under the circumstances, we are constrained to conclude that he has activated his party's propaganda button at a time when this political pastime is a pain on distressed Ghanaians.

Before reaching this despicable fiscal destination -   the worst in our post-independence economic history – the alarm bell was pressed by Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia about the approaching political Armageddon.

While observers of the floundering ship of state, both locally and abroad, shared the fears of Bawumia, government stayed its course on the path of fiscal indiscipline as though nothing was amiss, supporting the attitude with crude innuendos.

Now that the despicable thing has happened and we are at the doorstep of the IMF awaiting their prescriptions, such pretentious rendezvous with semantics of challenges or crisis is a further exhibition of denial of the highest order.

Ghanaians must feel insulted when their Number One Gentleman, as it were, should continue to throw dust into their eyes, even as he is already listening to the diktats of the IMF.

The truth is that we have turned to the IMF because our economy has virtually collapsed – the result of a sustained regimen of fiscal indiscipline, powered by a large dose of denial.

Information received even before now suggested that had the IMF option not been resorted to, the economy could have collapsed sooner than later.

And for the President to tell us that the IMF option is unlike the other approaches, and was informed by the need to apprise managers of the Bretton Woods institution about our home-grown response to the economic challenges (not crisis), is most weird and mendacious.

The touch of inconsistency in the application of the propaganda is another disturbing factor not worth the candle. The filling of a credibility gap and the quest for an IMF approval for our home-grown policy is inconsistent with the reality that our economy needs salvation. Is this Ghana?