What Cedi Depreciation Magic Are You Talking About?

Bernard Allotey-Jacobs used to be even more virulently dead-set against both the presidential ambitions and the presidency of the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo than his then lock-step political and ideological twin brother and comrade-in-arms, to wit, Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the dynastic General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and recent superannuated graduate of the Ghana Armed Forces Senior-Staff College. And then, over the course of time and emotional and psychological maturity, the self-described Cape Coast fisherman began to experience a Pauline Damascus type of epiphany that suddenly enabled him to come to the sobering realization that the seemingly entrenched diametrically opposed ideological differences between the country’s two major political parties and all, it was really the social-intervention oriented Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) that had the collective good and the cross-partisan interests of the Ghanaian citizenry at heart.

This epiphany occurred right about the time that Mr. Allotey-Jacobs was about to wind up his service as the Central Regional Chairman of the National Democratic Congress. Shortly after his retirement from the latter post, the humbly deported Cape Coast fisherman secured a gig on “Chairman” Kwami Sefa Kayi’s Number One breakfast current affairs talk-show called “Kokrokoo!” at the flagship Peace-FM radio station, evidently, with the blessing and sponsorship of the key operatives at the party’s Kokomlemle Headquarters. It was only a matter of time before the urbane and witty Oguaa fisherman arrived at the sobering conclusion that the National Democratic Congress’ party-machine operatives were much too cynically and fanatically set in their ways and their megalomaniacal proclivities to either envisage or recognize the existence of any good in their main political opponents who, by the way, they immutably envisaged to be their implacable enemies rather than ideological rivals or political adversaries.

This realization dawned with the landmark and, some would even say, watershed and historically seismic importation of some 300 spanking and squeaky -clean ambulance vehicles from Germany of a kind never witnessed in Ghana’s 60-odd years of postcolonial history. The Cape Coast fisherman would euphorically and rapturously jump up and literally out of his skin and ululate over the fact that these brand-new ambulances were so squeaking clean that a dying patient being ferried to the hospital emergency room on one of them would experience an immediate and complete healing half-way to his/her destination. It was this all-too-candid expression of gratitude and euphoria over a fetchingly good thing that got the metaphorically horses of the NDC’s kingpins at party Headquarters running riotous and berserk. All attempts to get the Cape Coast fisherman to walk back his words, as it were, and claim that he was profoundly sorry and that it has all been a mistake made matters even worse, when Mr. Allotey-Jacobs used even more poetic and picturesque language to hum the praises of “The Little Man from Kyebi.”

You see, it was not merely because these brash and fanatical party stalwarts and ideologues did not really recognize the great good that the sedate and levelheaded Cape Coast fisherman did recognize with a glint in his eyes that bespoke of a masterful stroke of genius of nirvana-like proportions, if there, indeed, were any such phenomenon. No, it was essentially because recognizing the great good in their archnemeses and inveterate political opponents and, in particular, expressing the same candidly and publicly on the broadcast airwaves was not savvy political strategizing in the overheated runup to the 2020 General Election, in particular, the 2020 Presidential Election.

That was how deathly and morbidly insecure these blowhard faux socio-democrats were and still remain. Even more damning was the fact that shortly before then-President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama lost the 2016 Presidential Election to the man whose 2012 Presidential-Election Victory had been literally handed over to Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Gonja, as Mr. Mahama is also popularly known and called, the extant Mahama-appointed Health Minister, Mr. Alexander Segbefia, a lawyer by profession and a former Crown legal practitioner in London, UK, had caused to be imported into the country some 300 vehicles, largely the hulks or empty shells of minivans and minitrucks of various models, shapes and forms with the dubious objective of augmenting the nation’s stock of state-owned ambulances.

The importation of what would shortly be disdainfully labeled as the “Mahama Lemons,” because most of these vehicles would be found to be totally unroadworthy and virtually engineless, had been greeted with deafening fanfare and media pump as a strategic coup d’état that was apt to significantly boost the chances of the violently wobbling Mahama government in the impending 2016 polls. But, of course, there was an eerily striking contradiction here that could only have been lost on those party fanatics who did not give a hoot, which was nearly each and every one of those pumped up and self-infatuated power-grabbing robber-barons. It was the seismically inescapable fact of the effective bankrupting and collapse of the landmark John Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), perhaps the very first of its kind in Anglophone West Africa, if not the entire ECOWAS Subregion, so-called.

The newly elected President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo would be left with absolutely no other alternative but to pump at least $ 2 billion (USD) of the nation’s scarce monetary resources into resuscitating the National Health Insurance Scheme, if the health of hardworking by criminally shortchanged Ghanaian blue-collar workers and civil and public servants was to be preserved and protected as a core precondition or indispensable prerequisite for the development of the country. Those ardent critics of the Akufo-Addo Administration who virulently fault the President and his cousin, the Finance Minister, Mr. Kenneth Ofori-Atta, for wasteful spending of the hard-earned Ghanaian taxpayer’s money, often conveniently either ignore or deliberately forget the fact that the present government has spent the bulk of the nation’s monetary and fiscal resources literally cleaning up the mountainous mess left behind by four-and-a-half protracted years of gross administrative incompetence and abject mismanagement of Ghana’s human and fiscal resources on the part of the previous Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress.

Still, Mr. Allotey-Jacobs’ almost solicitous and characteristically charitable remark that Mr. Ofori-Atta has begun performing some magical feats, or miracles, because the country’s legal tender, that is, the Cedi, has begun stabilizing against the US Dollar, after falling precipitously over the past several months, may not be all that magical after all. You see, one does not need to be an expert economist or economic-management specialist to recognize the fact that the real problem facing the country presently is a woeful lack of foreign exchange and the effective management of the country’s debts and balance of payment capacity. We should not kid ourselves about some of these things, Big Brother Bennie. We are literally on skid row. We are in very deep trouble as a nation with a very proud history and cultural heritage. And we have got to change the guard, all vehement protestations to the contrary and the convenient manufacturing of lame and pedestrian excuses – i.e., COVID, Russia-Ukraine War, Supply-Chain Disruptions – notwithstanding.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

September 4, 2022

E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

   Comments0