Steve Hanke Is an Absolute Nobody Here in the United States

He most likely has been paid fat sums of payola in hard currency to churn out the kinds of pabulum and incessant twaddle that he has been spewing on a plethora of Ghanaian media platforms and websites, in hopes of running down the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), so as to make it possible for the trial-and-error and the grossly and hopelessly incompetent Mahama-led main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to return to Jubilee House, so that he could continue to receive his fat propaganda goon’s payola windfalls. Steve Hanke, the Johns Hopkins University Professor of Economics, is virtually an unknown quantity of an Ivory-Tower denizen or member of the renowned and the respectable members of the professoriate hereabouts the United States of America. So, it really beats my imagination why none of the crackerjack local Ghanaian economists among the vanguard ranks of the ruling New Patriotic Party have not taken on this nondescript pretender by his metaphorical horns or scruff.

For my part, I have obviously not frontally taken on this veritable charlatan of a social scientist primarily because I am not an economist by training, although I feel indescribably agitated and flabbergasted by the fact that a nation of some 35-million relatively well-educated citizens and residents would be so cowed as to docilely and facilely allow such a joker and a masquerader on stilts to put us all through and into such virtual suspended animation. Now, where are those Ivy-League-educated scholars and thinkers that Attorney-General Godfred Yeboah-Dame was the other day disconsolately lamenting had been allocated some rusty cargo containers as office suites and spaces at the Ministry of Justice, both in Accra and all over the country?

My good guess is that these “White-Shy” and cravenly cowardly Ivy Leaguers are probably hiding under the heavy metallic office desks wherever they may be. Interestingly, I was not the least bit impressed by the largely plaintiff and self-pitying apology, pathetically paraded as a strongly worded rejoinder that was written and published by the Germany Chapter of the ruling New Patriotic Party recently (See “Steve Hanke's allegations against Akufo-Addo's gov't reckless, unfounded, preposterous – NPP Germany” Modernghana.com 6/28/24).

Not the least bit impressed because Nana Osei Boateng, who signed off on the afore-referenced letter as the Communications Director of the Germany Chapter of the New Patriotic Party, and his team of NPP stalwarts and diehard patriots, ought to have responded to the running tirades and fulminations by Prof. Hanke against the ruling New Patriotic Party point-by-point, instead of skittishly dealing in broad and amorphous generalities. They could have also highlighted the fact that, by and large, the economy of the United States of America, where the critic was presumably born and raised, is fundamentally and significantly not much different from what pertains in Ghana, in terms of corruption and gross managerial incompetence.

It has often been said that “Charity Must Begin at Home.” In other words, Nana Osei Boateng and his team of Concerned Ghanaian Citizens need to have challenged Prof. Hanke to catalog his contributions to the economic development of the United States of America and stop pretending as if he had absolutely no disciplinary coequals in both Ghana and the rest of the African Continent as a whole. If Ghana’s Central Bank has been an apocalyptic failure, as this insufferably vitriolic critic claims, let him tell us why even in a highly industrialized and technologically advanced economy like the United States of America – a country that prints and controls its own currency or legal tender, and has indescribably benefited from the unpaid labor of Africans for close to 400 years or more, by many accounts – still continues to rank as the most globally indebted nation even as I write.

It was not for absolutely nothing that, that anonymous Ancient Sage was immortalized for perspicuously observing that: “Those who live in glasshouses ought not to be throwing stones at their neighbors’ homes.” Which is absolutely in no way to say or imply that non-Ghanaian economists like Mr. Hanke have no right to criticize and point out some of the major flaws and shortcomings of the Akufo-Addo Government, or any other Continental African Government, for that matter. The long creditably attested fact of the matter is that no medicine could be more welcome to a deathly ill patient, such as our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, like constructive criticism of the kind championed by globally renowned and distinguished economists like Columbia University’s Prof. Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, co-creator of the New Branch of Economics called “The Economics of Information,” which aims to facilitate the equitable spread of specialized expert knowledge in the discipline of economics, economic theory and policymaking literacy.

You see, what often manifests as gross economic mismanagement is largely and primarily the result of an abject lack of economics information literacy. Ironically, the one Ghanaian politician belatedly influenced by Prof. Stiglitz was the late lawyer turned Rawlings-appointed Secretary, later Minister, of Finance and Economic Planning, Prof. Kwesi Botchway. As long as he pursues constructive criticism of the economic policies of the Akufo-Addo Administration, Prof. Hanke must be unreservedly welcome to do so. However, if his sole intent and purpose is to destructively run down Ghana’s most progressive Fourth-Republican government, then this is not the very last time that the resident of the US State of Maryland will be hearing from the likes of Sincerely Yours. Talking down to our leaders like a Seventeenth-Century plantation slaveowner or slaveholder is also completely not among the deck of our playing cards. A word to the wise… or is it to the fool?

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
June 29, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]