CPP Youth Warn IMF

The International Monetary Fund intervened comprehensively in our economy in 1983 with its Structural Adjustment Programme of liberalisation, privatisation and stabilisation.

It was presented as the appropriate and effective economic programme for the development of our economy by the then Minister of Finance and Economic Planning Dr. Kwesi Botchway, now Professor Kwesi Botchway, the current Chairman of our National Development Planning Commission.

After thirty one years of implementation of the programme, our economy remains an under-developed peasant agricultural economy with widespread poverty and misery amidst corruption in high places. On the other hand, South Korea, China, Malaysia and India have transformed their economies within twenty years on the basis of their own development perspectives and without the meddling of the IMF.

IMF development policy prescriptions are not founded on our development history and do not therefore relate to our development aspirations and objectives. They are implicitly not intended to serve our development needs but to divert from and inhibit our economic growth and development.

IMF development policy prescriptions however, provide the platform for the realization of the common interests of the profit seeking Western financial sector and our corrupt political leadership that accepts and implements these policy directives.

The IMF standard policy prescription of fiscal austerity and tight monetary policy is a debt trap that makes us dependent on their loans and supports hikes in interest rates that enables the Western financial sector to earn abnormal profits in our financial markets. The infrastructure loans of the IMF and the World Bank extended in exchange for our compliance with IMF financial and economic bailout conditions serve as the feedstock of our corrupt political leadership.

The stabilisation of our exchange rate with IMF balance of payment support advances insure the investments of Western investment bankers against exchange losses and gives a good, albeit false report of government economic performance. Employment creation and not exchange rate is the key and prime indicator of government economic performance in all economies.

There is no iota of doubt that IMF with the prompting and support of our corrupt political leadership is here to follow the trail of the colonial enterprise of expropriation of African resources blazed by their founding fathers that include among others, the United Africa Company, the East India Company, the East Asiatic Company, Cecil Rhodes and Lord Lugard.

We the CPP Youth are in opposition inspired by the spirit of the struggle of our nation for political freedom and the moral justification of the development policy of decolonisation of our founding father, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah to protect and develop our productive resources for national prosperity. (As per the Akan proverb, "se wo maame atu wo fo a me so me maame atu me fo")

We the CPP Youth therefore promise on our honour that we shall defend our heritage, resist our economic oppressors and protest till we meet our ancestors, the inclusion of the conditions of fiscal austerity, removal of utility, fuel and social intervention subsidies, retrenchment of labour, wage and employment freeze, and sale of public investments by private negotiations in the bailout negotiations.

The resolution of the development policy dispute is by open debate that gives an opportunity for questions and the IMF to defend their development policy prescriptions. The brilliant and not too brilliant economists of the IMF should have their "day in court."

But the IMF is not here to debate but to dictate. This should be unacceptable to a sovereign nation. It is our fortune and reward through the sacrifices of our forefathers that Ghana, our beloved country is free forever and we are no longer a colonial territory.

The IMF should therefore shape up or ship out.

Ernesto Kofi Yeboah
Deputy National Youth Organiser
For CPP Youth League
www.convention peoplesparty.org