Born With Debt; The Plight Of Ghanaians Unborn Children.

How will you feel if one day you are asked to pay for a loan which was borrowed by your father or grandfather? I mean a loan you have no idea about but yet you are asked to pay for it. Yes! That is the condition Ghanaians unborn children are likely to face in the future. Whiles other countries are building houses for the next generation, we are accumulating debt for them to inherit. I recall vividly in my days in the village, when one will go to a relative to borrow money. This relative of yours will keep mute for you to narrate all your problems and reasons for coming to borrow. After you are done with your chronicles of stories, he will just tell you “oooh sorry, I wish I could help you but unfortunately, I just gave out the money to someone, you should have come earlier” You will now begin to swallow your saliva and you then become speechless.

Our governments have borrowed so much over the past years. And sometimes I feel very doleful to hear them argue on radio about who has the best borrowing skills. One thing we can all be assured of is that none of these governments is interested in paying off their loans before leaving office. It is our unborn children who may have to come and pay off these huge debts our governments are accumulating. According to the Finance Minister on 20^th November 2014, Ghana’s public debt stands at GHC 69,705.90m. Which means every citizen owns about GHC3000 including children who don’t even have bank accounts. I have no problem when a government takes loans to solve the problems of it citizens and that of the problems of the unborn children as done by Gadhafi in Libya. I only have a problem when loans taking by governments are mismanaged, misused and characterized with massive corruption. And yet our unborn children would have to come and pay. I have been wondering what they would use to pay off these debt. Of course, the cocoa trees will be dead, our current cocoa farmers will be at old age by then and we the youth today are never interested in cocoa farming. So eventually there will be a reduction in our main foreign exchange commodity which is cocoa in the near future. Our minerals are also depleted every day and the oil, the least you talk about it the better but thank God there was a policy to set aside a portion of the money from the oil for the future generation.

My message is that, our governments must be very careful in their borrowing habits. Most of these loans are going to be paid by our unborn children. And we are depleting all the natural resources too. The loans must be utilized to the benefits of the future generation. I feel very forlorn anytime I take the time to think about our unborn children because though they are not yet born, debts have been accumulated for them to come and pay. God bless our motherland. “We are not children of a lesser god”

Ntenhene Felix
( [email protected] )
KNUST.