Gross Fiscal Indiscipline Is Our Problem, Not IMF Conditionalities, Trust Me

Finally, in Mr. Kwame Pianim, we have a fairly well-respected elderly Ghanaian statesman who is frank and honest enough to argue for the imperative need for force Ghanaian Presidents – actually, all of both our elected and democratically appointed leaders – to govern the country according to the established rules of fiscal discipline and responsible governance, such as the strict adherence to the Public Finance Management Act, which this author did not even know existed on the books, as it were (See “We Should Not Pay the Retirement Benefits of Presidents Who Take Us to IMF – Kwame Pianim” Modernghana.com 5/27/23).

Although it has often been said that “It is better late than never” to do things that ought to have been done well beforehand or the present time, still, the renowned and distinguished Ghanaian economist’s admonishment comes rather much too late in the game, as it were. If I remember it at least near-accurately enough, Mr. Pianim must either be 80 years old or he may have just pushed past the 80-year mark, that is, at least a decade past the average span of the Biblically prosperous and well-lived life.

But, of course, that is surely not the only significant problem here; which is the inescapable fact that Mr. Pianim has willfully served in executive capacities as an appointed government official, including the government of the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led junta of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the rag-tag and constitutionally illegitimate “revolutionary” regime that has wreaked more catastrophic damage on our postcolonial Ghanaian economy than any other government either before all after the latter, and continues to do so even to this day in the guise of the faux-democratically constituted and Rawlings-Founded terrorist institutional establishment that is the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

As well, his paradoxically significant admonishment that any President of Ghana from hence who takes the country into the Procrustean clutches of the much-maligned twin Bretton-Woods establishments of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and The World Bank, that is, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), must be denied his/her retirement benefits, equally comes as rather much too little and too late. Which, in effect, means that absolutely no Ghanaian leader since Independence would qualify. Plus, the fact that this is akin to calling for the stitching up of a completely frazzled or ripped item of human wear or clothing, when what is really called for is the total discarding of the entire article of clothing and the latter’s replacement with a brand-new wear.

Which argument is one that any critically thinking Ghanaian citizen cannot but unreservedly concur with the Yale University-educated Mr. Pianim; which is that what is unignorably called for at this juncture in our postcolonial history is a completely new paradigmatic mode of thinking and managing our beloved nation’s macroeconomy. You see, Dear Reader, as I read through the afore-referenced brief news item, as Nigerian media operatives are wont to say, the thought that kept interrupting the rhythmic flow of my concentration was the news reporter’s rather smug and pat description of Mr. Pianim as “a very successful businessman.”

Which logically connected with the implicit fact of the professional credibility and the moral authority of this octogenarian critic in lecturing all of us, bona fide members of the Global Ghanaian Community, on the imperative need to put our burning house in order before cavalierly and peevishly presuming to make any downright politically irresponsible remarks about the so-called genocidal IMF Conditionalities. Which, by the way, are absolutely nothing new or decidedly outrageous, when one also reckons the fact that the real bane of our seemingly interminably cyclical socioeconomic predicament is also invariably and exclusively one of reckless spending of taxpayer money in ways that “successful” entrepreneurs like Mr. Pianim would not spend their own.

Which also logically brings up the fact that nearly each and every one of our major leaders and politicians are filthy rich millionaires and billionaires. Which further raises the critical question of just precisely how did these administratively profligate elected and “democratically appointed” leaders came by their enormous wealth – most of it ill-gotten, by the way – and even more significantly, how have they been able to not only keep such wealth intact, for the most part, but have also actually been able to exponentially increase such wealth by leaps and bounds over time, even as these same leaders went to Washington, DC, year-in and year-out, with hats in hand, fatuously and grotesquely begging for more like a Dickensian Oliver Twist?

Now, what needs to be highlighted here is the brutal and unpalatable fact that Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, President Kwame Nkrumah, was catastrophically inaccurate in his rather pontifical declaration on the eve of our admittedly opportune and auspicious reassertion of Ghana’s sovereignty from Britain’s colonial imperialism that: “The Black Man [and the Black Woman as well] was ready and well-prepared to wisely and successfully take charge of his own affairs.” And, by the way, My Dear, Good, Old Mr. Pianim, it was the immortalized Prof. Albert Einstein, the German-Jewish Theoretical Physicist and Nobel Prize Laureate, who is verifiably on record as having said that: “Madness is when you keep doing the same wrongful things over and over again and yet expect [a positive] and different result each time.”

You see, our collective “Madness” as a people and a nation inheres in the invariable fact that, by and large, Ghanaians believe in corrupt leadership, even while also expecting the dismal fortunes of our country to significantly and substantially improve. Now, just imagine who the cynical and the hopelessly kleptocratic leadership of Ghana’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), wants to be returned to Jubilee House and back to the helm of our national affairs. As well, just look at how the double-salary thieving “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama cabinet appointees were so heartily and “gloriously” and “generously” treated by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. And for good measure, the Almighty Agyapa Gravy-Train Mega-Scam that was so criminally and savagely orchestrated by Nana Akufo-Addo’s own blood relatives!

Indeed, even as the poet and lawyer by the name of Kobena Eyi Acquah, from the small city of Winneba, in Ghana’s Central Region, once wrote in his maiden collection of poems, “Where We Are Going Is [Very] Long.” In the latter instance, as well, as yours truly vividly recalls, the speaker of these quoted words was a disheveled clinically lunatic and homeless bona fide Ghanaian citizen walking the streets of our nation’s capital of Accra.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 28, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]