Ghana Can Borrow Money, But It Cannot Borrow Character

A nation's balance sheet can be repaired with a loan. Its conscience cannot. That, in essence, is the uncomfortable truth behind a recent remark by Rev. Dr. Kwabena Opuni-Frimpong, former General Secretary of the Christian Council of Ghana and Executive Director of the Alliance for Christian Advocacy Africa, who observed that a country can borrow money for its development but cannot borrow character for its people. It is a short sentence, but it names precisely why so much of Ghana's development effort keeps stalling in the same place: not for lack of capital, but for lack of character among the people entrusted to use it.

Ghana has never truly lacked access to money. Since independence, the country has taken on concessional loans, Eurobonds, IMF programmes, donor grants and development partnerships in numbers few nations can match. Roads have been built, schools funded, hospitals equipped — and yet, cyclically, we find ourselves back at the negotiating table, cap in hand, explaining to the next set of creditors why the last round of borrowing did not deliver the transformation it promised. The money arrived. The character to steward it did not always follow.

This is the pattern Rev. Dr. Opuni-Frimpong's statement forces us to confront. He has, in other public remarks, pointed to the scale of unaccounted public funds and the burden this places on generations yet unborn — money borrowed today, quietly misused, and repaid tomorrow by children who had no say in how it was spent. He has also spoken about how monetised politics rewards the highest bidder over the most competent, and how officials shield one another rather than hold each other to account. Different topics, same thread: institutions can be financed, but integrity cannot be imported. It has to be built, deliberately, inside people.

It is tempting, in the face of scandal after scandal, to conclude that the problem is simply "leadership" — that if we changed the people at the top, the rot would end. But character deficits are rarely confined to the political class alone. They show up in the contractor who pads an invoice, the officer who demands a facilitation fee for a service that is supposed to be free, the examiner who leaks a paper, the citizen who cheers corruption when it benefits their own party and condemns it only when it benefits the other. A country's character is the sum of its people's private choices, made when no one is watching. No World Bank facility, no bilateral loan, no development partner disbursement can substitute for that.

This is why Rev. Dr. Opuni-Frimpong's framing deserves more than a nod of agreement — it deserves to shape how we think about development itself. We often measure progress in kilometres of road paved, megawatts added to the grid, or GDP growth points. These are legitimate and necessary metrics. But they say nothing about whether the institutions delivering them are trustworthy, or whether the next cohort of public servants, contractors, and citizens will treat public resources as a shared trust rather than a private opportunity. A country can have first-class infrastructure sitting atop a culture of impunity — and history shows that such infrastructure eventually crumbles, both physically and financially, because the character to maintain it was never built alongside it.

Rebuilding character at national scale is slower and harder than negotiating a loan facility, and it will not show up in a single budget cycle. It requires, among other things, a return to civic and moral education in our schools that goes beyond passing exams; religious and traditional institutions willing to hold their own members accountable, not just preach to the public; a media culture that names wrongdoing consistently, regardless of which party or which tribe the wrongdoer belongs to; and public institutions with real consequences for those who breach the public trust, applied evenly, not selectively.

None of this is a call to stop borrowing, or to romanticise poverty as somehow more honest than debt. Ghana, like every developing nation, will continue to need capital to build what it cannot yet build alone. But Rev. Dr. Opuni-Frimpong's statement is a necessary corrective to the assumption that money alone develops a country. Development is ultimately a human project before it is a financial one. We can borrow the money. The character that decides what becomes of it has to be ours — cultivated, defended, and passed on, one honest choice at a time.

If we take that seriously, the next loan we sign will not simply add to a debt figure quoted in the news. It will, for once, be matched by a people equipped to make it count.

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