Ghana: Its Time for Reset

Our country needs a reset. We may not have to wait until the election; otherwise, things could be far worse.

The government has borrowed so much that they can't pay, and so they have pushed repayments of our debts forward for future generations to pay. Since 2022, the government has suspended debt servicing. In the process of overborrowing, they have collateralized almost every revenue source that future generations will depend on. To make matters worse, the loans they take are not invested in areas that will leave some wealth for future generations to rely on. These same guys turn around to sell anything and everything belonging to the state to themselves—lands, bungalows, institutions, strategic assets, estates, everything belonging to us that we hand over in trust to them to take care of—they sell to themselves for cheap. They are doing this to insulate their children and their children's children from the future suffering they have cooked for us today.

We're working today on a $2 minimum wage and barely surviving. But we are probably lucky. People have lost their jobs, businesses, and livelihoods because of this government's bad economic policies and reckless decisions. The same government has robbed our elderly of their retirement and any investment they may leave for us through DDEP. So, in the future, their children, who have everything, will tell our children that we didn't ‘bɔ bra’ and the cycle will continue.

In all this, our Parliament is busy trying to pass a law that will ensure that 275 of them and their assigns will be allowed to drive without a speed limit in Accra with sirens blurring at us while we sweat in traffic so they can get to Alisa Hotel on time to have lunch. When you and I want to get anywhere early, we wake up early and leave home early to join the death traps plying the streets of Accra as public transport. Why can't MPs, who we have all agreed to give a comfortable life, also wake up early and get to work early like all of us, or at best, do something about the traffic situation that deprives our country of productive hours?

Quiet clearly, the ruling class has lost touch with reality, and like it happened in Kenya, we must try and remind them of the interests they are supposed to serve, ours, not theirs. Organised labour has shown that they have the power to stop nonsense (pardon my French). Perhaps it's time to turn the heat up a bit.