Ghana: Who Invited the IMF?

Again, rather than a blunt, no-holds-barred polemic, I shall employ political satire to address the news item in ModernGhana’s 12 September 2026 article, in which Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor, Ghana’s Parliament’s Majority Chief Whip, calls on the IMF to leave Ghana alone.

Yoruba proverb: Ẹni tí kò fẹ́ kí a pariwo lórí ìyán òun, kò gbọ́dọ̀ ra iṣu ní àwín / He who does not want people shouting over his pounded yam must not buy yam on credit.

This old Yoruba proverb, like most old proverbs, has the indecent habit of staying intelligent even after politicians have stopped thinking. If you bought the yam on credit, the creditor is entitled to ask why your pounding is so careless, why your soup is watery, and why your children are eating the yam while your neighbors are hungry.

He is entitled to ask you anything.
You cannot invite the creditor into your kitchen, sign away the mortar, pledge the pestle, and then accuse him of meddling because he has noticed that your door is crooked.

Our ancestors were wise. Unfortunately, as Marcus Garvey warned us, we have drunk from too much of Western civilization; it has destroyed us.

Despite all our fanciful diplomas, certificates, and whatnot, we no longer have sense.

The Yoruba proverb above encapsulated the tragedy of the African plantation supervisors masquerading as leaders: four decades ago, they invited the International Monetary Fund to sit at their table; they begged it to inspect the pantry, they handed it the keys to the storeroom and the entire family house, then suddenly discovered the sacred doctrine of sovereignty when the creditor asks who appointed the drunkard in charge of the bar.

To make sense of what MP Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor reportedly said, I do what I do best: go to the source to find things out for myself.

Even though I left at dawn to beat the traffic and all that, the Kasoa to Accra was already a parliament of suffering even at that wee hour. Trotros coughed black theology into the morning, with priests loudly beseeching the goblins of the sky to come and provide for citizens what citizens in other climes receive from their governments. Hawkers moved between vehicles with the agility of people whose government had outsourced their survival to traffic. An elderly, slightly obese woman sold sachet water beneath a billboard promising economic transformation by an aspiring politician. The billboard looks fresh; the water looks warm.

At the Old Barrier, a taxi driver cursed that the lights had gone off again. At Weija, a mechanic (they call them fitters in Ghana. Don’t ask me why.) fixing a loose tire cursed the national grid with the intimacy of a betrayed husband. At Mallam, I overheard a mother carrying a plastic basin telling her daughter that Accra had drinking water somewhere, but that ordinary people must first become ministers, consultants, or parliament committee members to find it.

The further I traveled into Accra, the more magnificent the Republic of Ghana became. Behind high walls with electric fences, there were air-conditioned offices where men in expensive suits debated “fiscal space.” Outside the walls, citizens made space in overcrowded buses.

Inside the plush offices, sovereignty was a constitutional principle. Outside, it was a deep pothole filled with brown, murky water.

The office of the Majority Leader was so grand and opulent that a substantial part of the republic’s loan must have been devoted to bringing it up to its standard. My interlocutor had recently declared that the IMF was meddling in Ghana’s internal politics because it had expressed concern about political influence in appointing boards and executives of state-owned enterprises. The Honorable Gentleman insisted that the Fund must respect Ghana’s constitutional arrangements. He was particularly offended by the suggestion that political affiliation might matter in managing public institutions.

I found him seated beneath a portrait of a founding father and beside a bowl of imported fruits and assorted bottles of imported beverages. He wore Kente of such dazzling magnificence that the price tag must be enough to banish hunger from his constituency. His assistants moved about with the urgency of people whose salaries were paid on time.

“Honorable,” I began without preamble, “who invited the IMF to Ghana?”

He adjusted his spectacles. “That is an unfair question.”

“It is a simple question.”
“We invited them to assist us.”
“To assist you with what?”
“With our economic programme.”
“And now that they have arrived?”

“They must not interfere in our internal affairs.”

I looked at his expensive Kente. The Kente looked back at me with the tired silence of a nation that had seen too many useless political speeches.

“Honorable,” I said, “on your own accord, you invited a foreign institution to diagnose your economy, prescribe the medicine, monitor the dosage, and supervise the pharmacist. But when it asks why you appoint party loyalists to institutions that are supposed to serve the public, you suddenly become the reincarnation of Kwame Nkrumah.”

“Political affiliation does not disqualify competence.” He shouted at me.

“Certainly not, Sir! But neither do fine and expensive Kente clothes manufacture competence. My question, Sir, is not whether a party member can be intelligent; it’s whether the state has become a reward shop where party service is mistaken for qualification for public offices.”

He frowned. “The IMF is a supranational organization. It has no mandate to dictate our governance. Ghana is a sovereign, independent country. In case you have not noticed.” He was getting belligerent.

I remain undaunted. “Yet the IMF has had a mandate, given to it by you and your colleagues in the parliament, to dictate our budgets, our subsidies, our wage restraint, our taxes, our privatization programmes, our debt restructuring, the destruction of our currency, and the price of our bread. It is only the appointment of cousins, bedmates, side chicks, schoolmates and campaign financiers into public service that has suddenly become inviolable sovereignty?”

The Honorable Gentleman leaned forward. “We are a sovereign country.” He repeated.

“Sorry, Sir, but sovereignty is not a ceremonial word to be taken out of the cupboard whenever a creditor notices our corruption or our wayward lifestyles. Sovereignty means the capacity to make decisions in the public interest and bear the consequences. It does not mean surrendering your economic freedom and retaining only the freedom to shout at the surrender agent.”

In a tired voice, the Majority Leader said that the IMF was “out of order.” I asked whether Ghana had been in order when it returned to the Fund for the umpteenth time. He countered that the Fund should not meet the opposition. I asked whether the IMF had previously required a visa to speak to the people who might inherit the crisis. He said he knew the meetings being held and the discussions taking place surreptitiously (his words). I asked whether this was the language of a sovereign parliamentarian or of a plantation overseer afraid that the workers might discover the payroll.

There was a long silence. Somewhere in the building, I heard a photocopier reproduce another document obviously promising accountability.

“Honorable,” I continued, “how do people like you sleep well at night?”

“Excuse me?”
“Sir, how do you and your colleagues in the parliament sleep after selling the nation’s patrimony? Ghana Telecom and other strategic assets were sold off under a dubious privatization programme, often at prices that made the public wonder whether the buyer had paid the auctioneer. Gold left the nation’s ground. Timber left our forest, our cocoa was pledged, borrowed against, refinanced and rhetorically transformed into prosperity. Yet after borrowing untold billions, the republic cannot guarantee treated water or reliable electricity for ordinary citizens.”

He objected vociferously that privatization was complex.

“Of course it is complex,” I replied. “The complexity is how national assets became private opportunities while public liabilities remained public. The people were told that the state was inefficient, so you sold the state. Then you borrowed money to repair the consequences of selling it. Then you invited the IMF to supervise the repair. Then you accused the IMF of meddling because it noticed the furniture was gone.”

Like every African politician, he invokes development as a priest invokes heaven after misplacing the church funds.

“Development requires hard choices,” he said.

“Indeed. But whose children make the hard choices? The child of the market woman studies by candlelight while the Honorable Member’s son studies abroad. The ordinary citizen queues for a hospital bed while the political class flies out for treatment even for illness that could be treated in the country. The taxpayer suffers austerity while parliamentarians collect fantastic salaries, allowances and emoluments, and then perform astonishment when the IMF asks whether the national purse is being used as a party inheritance.”

He parried that parliamentarians were not overpaid.

At this point I had to admire his courage. It takes a rare species of shamelessness to make such a declaration in a country where teachers, nurses and civil servants are instructed to serve patriotically on wages that cannot survive a week of inflation.

“Honorable,” I replied, please try to understand our outrage. “You and your colleagues sit in plush offices where you collect salaries that would make our village chiefs dizzy; you then invite people with whom you studied and worked as consultants to come from the IMF and prescribe solutions to problems for which you were elected or appointed, and for which you’re paid. What happened to expertise you touted in your campaigns? Did it expire after the elections?”

He replied that Ghana had capable people.
“Then why did successive governments keep importing supervision?”

He said the IMF was only providing technical assistance.

“Technical assistance is what a country requests after its political class has converted wisdom into patronage. You cannot spend four decades appointing the politically convenient, borrowing against the future, looting the present and subsidizing incompetence, then complain that the technician has entered the room.”

He replied that the government is doing its best when I asked him to explain sovereignty to the woman in Kasoa who buys water in Kufuor gallon because the state cannot provide it, to the driver in Weija whose vehicle is destroyed by dilapidated roads built with borrowed money, and to the young graduate whose country has gold, timber, cocoa and oil but offers him unemployment and a patriotic lecture.

Unfortunately, that excuse is the anthem of every failed administration: we are doing our best. To the average Kofi, their best is always somewhere between a loan application and a press conference. Their patriotism is always loudest after they have mortgaged sovereign assets. They wrap themselves in Kente, quote independence heroes and denounce external interference, while their policies remain obedient to the appetites of financiers, speculators, contractors and party networks.

When would our MPs educate themselves that the IMF is not a charitable auntie, but an institution of global financial power, embedded in a geopolitical order where debt becomes discipline and “reform” means protecting creditors before protecting citizens?

Except to the purblind, the IMF's history in Africa is not innocent. But the theatre of wounded sovereignty becomes obscene when the very leaders who surrender economic policy on their knees rise to denounce the creditor for poking through the closets.

The real scandal we see here is not that the IMF has opinions; it is that African leaders have made those opinions necessary. Our plantation supervisors have confused independence with flags and anthems, sovereignty with recycled highfalutin speeches, and patriotism with the ability to loudly shout “Ghana, our homeland” while selling Ghana piece by piece.

On the return journey to Kasoa, the traffic lights were off again. A child in the trotro asked his mother why the electricity was always disappearing. She calmly explained that it would come back.

That is the Ghanaian national creed: everything is always coming back - power, accountability, dignity, sovereignty - except the money already stolen and the future already mortgaged.

So, Honorable Members, kindly spare us the deafening, hypocritical nonsense. Stop shouting at the IMF after inviting it into the kitchen. Stop garbing yourselves in a patriotic halo to advertise policies that are anti-people and unpatriotic. Stop pretending that four decades of failure became independence because you have found a foreign institution to insult.

As we have always noted on this blog: If we Africans want sovereignty, we should build the capacity to stand without begging. That is what Iran and China did. We must understand that respect is not an entitlement; if we want it, we have to earn it.

Above all, we must remember our ancestors’ wisdom: If you want the creditor out of your kitchen, stop buying the yam on credit.

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com