Ransford Gyampo Grandstands Like an Ignorant NDC Faux-Revolutionary Cadre

The recent sharp rises in the prices of various bags of cement brands – I hope “Lt-Col.” Johnson “The Bui Dam Woyome” Asiedu-Nketia is not smack in the details, as it were – is primarily due to what in High School Economics is called the Law of Supply and Demand, in American English, or Demand and Supply, in the erstwhile British colonized and still heavily dominated world, presently euphemistically designated as The Commonwealth of Nations or simply The Commonwealth or The Commonwealth Area of Politically Independent and Semi-Dependent Nations.

Now, what the Law of Supply and Demand or Demand and Supply means in a Free-Market Economy of the sort ideologically advocated and studiously promoted by the leadership of the institutional establishment of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), is that the prices of consumable commodities and other essential merchandise, as they are routinely categorized in Ghana, are dictated by the level and the volume of production, the rate of ease of the transportation and the distribution of the same, as well as even more significantly, the number of consumers in need of such merchandise or commodities.

Which was precisely why in the wake of the global outbreak of the so-called Wuhan Virus or the COVID-19 Pandemic, the prices of most imports, even right here in the United States of America, largely from China, Japan and South Korea, as well as even from Europe, skyrocketed to hitherto unprecedented heights that have yet to significantly subside or to be brought back to the much lower Pre-Pandemic Era prices. In the best of worlds, it is the producers of these finished manufactured products who determined the prices of the same, and not just any government or legislative assembly anywhere in the world of an industrially woefully underproductive or impoverished country such as Ghanaians witnessed under the faux-revolutionary juntas of the Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led blood-thirsty Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) of the late 1970s and most of the 1980s and early 1990s.

You see, it is patently and inexcusably absurd for any politician or academician, least of all a political scientist or a historian, such as Mr. K T Hammond, the Akufo-Addo-appointed Trade Minister, and Prof. Ransford Gyampo, of the University of Ghana, Legon, to cavalierly suppose or presume that they could whimsically introduce a Legislative Instrument (LI) or a Bill in Parliament to regulate the prices of cement and other merchandise very little of which are produced in the country with any significant fiscal incentives provided by the government of the day. This is what makes the largely emotional call by Messrs. Hammond and Gyampo for the government to slap “controlled prices” or price ceilings on the sharply risen prices of imported commodities, on the capricious grounds of the economic difficulties and hardships that the prices of such commodities have imposed on consumers patently untenable and decidedly absurd (See “We Can’t Allow Unpatriotic People to Inflict Hardship on Ghanaians – Prof. Gyampo Backs Cement LI” Modernghana.com 6/29/24).

You see, in a “Command Economy,” that is, unlike the kind of Free Market-Oriented Economy that Ghanaians presently have or enjoy, and that which prevailed under the Rawlings-led juntas of the AFRC and the PNDC, that is, the ideological antecedents of the present-day National Democratic Congress, unlike the present system which is more relatively and efficiently practiced and ideologically advocated with inimitable efficiency by the present Akufo-Addo- and Mahamudu Bawumia-led New Patriotic Party, the bottom-line is one of Supply and Demand. Which simply means that instead of irrationally picking up a street fight merely because one cannot afford the price of a ball of kenkey and fried fish with red or black pepper sauce, or even the price of rice-and-beans on the food market, the hungry and angry street fighter would be better off looking for other more affordable and cheaper alternatives, such as a finger or two of ripe bananas and peanuts – called groundnuts in Ghana – or even a finger of well-baked ripe plantain and roasted peanuts, instead of foolishly and idiotically assuming that one can force one’s way on somebody else by arbitrarily and crazily tweaking the contours of the law to suit or gibe with one’s whim or caprice.

You see, the very notion of causing the criminal incarceration of cement manufacturers or producers and distributors who sensibly and flatly refuse to kowtow to the whims of people who have never themselves owned even a baked-plantain and salted-fish grill on the roadside, much less own and operate a cement factory, for up to three years, is definitely one that could easily provoke a century-long civil strife in the country. And trust me, Yours Truly would be one of the very first Ghanaian citizens to learn how to shoot an AK-47 rifle in preparation for such a morally righteous drawn-out war.

Fortunately, as of this writing, Speaker of Parliament Alban S K Bagbin had opportunely intervened to soberly remind professional clowns like Messrs. Hammond and teenage schoolgirl-molesters like Gyampo of the fact that Ghanaians have already gone down this primrose path before, once upon a time, and only ended up counting our cedis in exchange for the dollar in the millions and the billions, until an Oxbridge-educated crackerjack economist by the name of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia arrived on the scene and taught us how to make our criminally P/NDC “junkified” cedi shinplaster, that was the shameful legacy of the ingloriously protracted 20-year Rawlings’ vise-like grips on our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana count for something worthwhile again, by being able to, once again, fit the cedi into our purses and wallets.

Unfortunately, there are still some “past mistakes-correcting” cretins and incurable political and ideological buffoons who are still counting their cedis the old way, even as we speak, hoping that, somehow, the mere sing-song repetition of such madness will wish our miserable and inglorious economic past away, like one of those magical flying mats in Indian and Arabian fables in our kindergarten textbooks. How stupid!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
September 9, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]