Prof Abakah’s Critical Analysis Still Vindicates Vice-President Bawumia’s Diagnosis of Ghana’s Economic Malaise

I have read the media report on the Ghanaian-born Academic and Financial Expert by the name of Prof. Alexander Annan Abakah, of Bentley University, in Waltham, Massachusetts, right here in America’s New England, and perfectly agree with his research findings regarding the crux of Ghana’s perennial and seemingly intractable socioeconomic malaise, which also perfectly gibes with what Ghana’s Oxbridge-educated Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, the 2024 Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), who is also widely tipped to be poised to become Ghana’s Next President, has been saying for about a decade now.

Like Dr. Bawumia, Prof Abakah also underscores the widely long-known fact that Ghana’s massive economic malaise has largely been due to what both scholars attribute to the “Weak Fundamentals” of the country’s socioeconomic architecture, which essentially means that the basis upon which both the institutional and the administrative mechanisms of the country were wired or established, largely on a proto-colonial model of a consumerist and a raw-material exporting culture, is completely outdated and in dire need of radical restructuring, if Ghana is to experience a progressive and a seismic paradigmatic shift from its present neocolonialist orientation to an enviable and an emulative and an autonomous postcolonial economy.

Which is why I beg to take issue with the caption given the news story which appeared on the Class FM Online media website as follows: “Economist Debunks Claims Russia-Ukraine War and COVID-19 as Causes of Cedi Depreciation” (12/1/24). Even non-disciplinary specialists like this writer have been well aware of the fact that Ghana’s perennial socioeconomic malaise has been due predominantly to the reckless and the gross administrative incompetence of the leadership of the erstwhile late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led extortionate junta of the faux-socialist and populist Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and, subsequently, the faux-civilianized and democratically elected Rawlings-led National Democratic Congress (NDC), whose leadership, at the urging of the procrustean tailors of the one-size-fits-all neocolonialist loan-shark creditors of the twin Bretton-Woods establishments of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), better known globally as The World Bank, completely dismantled the Kwame Nkrumah-established seminal industrial dynamo that was the hitherto unprecedented Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), comprised of some 140 factories and manufacturing plants, that was geared towards kick-starting the Postcolonial Continental African Industrial Revolution.

Now, the question of whether the COVID-19 Pandemic “contributed only 11% to the cedi’s depreciation” is neither here nor there, as it were. What matters is that capital-intensive protective measures were taken on an unprecedented scale that might not have been taken, had the entire experience not been totally unpredictable in both duration and dimension or magnitude. At any rate, precisely how was such a figure as the preceding arrived at? And then also, what is the real magnitude of the latter figure when translated into cedi and dollar value?

What is clear, though, and on this question, too, I perfectly agree with Prof Abakah, is that somebody who had poorly managed the country’s economy, very likely the former Finance Minister, to wit, Mr. Kenneth Ofori-Atta, was trying to pass the buck, as it were, by deliberately concocting a bogeyman subterfuge to cover up his logically unsound pretext for such managerial or gross incompetence when, in fact, the real problem was an equal combination of gross administrative incompetence, perhaps, even significantly mixed with corruption, and the sort of “Weak Fundamentals” of the neocolonialist structure of the country’s economy that both Vice-President Bawumia and Prof Abakah appear to be in sound and perfect agreement with.

Significantly, though, the news reporter or source, Mr. Cecil Mensah, does not provide much as to the unignorable impact or the considerable toll that President Akufo-Addo’s prompt and timely decision to resuscitate the Mahama-bankrupted John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) must have obviously taken on the cedi. As well, Nana Akufo-Addo’s game-changing decision to implement the Universally Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education System which, nearly seven years later, has significantly upgraded the quality of Ghana’s public education system from being among the very worst under the previous National Democratic Congress-sponsored tandem Mills-Mahama regimes, into one of the finest on the African Continent and anywhere around the world.

As well, the $2.5 billion (USD) that Nana Akufo-Addo borrowed to reactivate the world-famous Asante Goldfields Corporation, and the dozens of infrastructure development deficits that the lame-duck Akufo-Addo Administration has been expeditiously attempting to make up, such as the Agenda 111 National Health Policy Agenda, under which some 88 administrative districts that lacked major hospitals and health centers are being provided with state-of-the-art facilities. Of course, one cannot discount the high spate of official corruption and the perennially abject lack of fiscal discipline, irrespective of which political party-sponsored government has been in power. There is, of course, enough blame to go around, as the common saying goes. Structural Reforms, not “Metropolitan”-dictated Structural Adjustment.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
December 2, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]