The Tragedy Of Neoliberalism To Ghana's Self-Reliance

YK Amakye Ansah-Yeboah, Founding President CPAG Common Purpose Alliance Ghana

Neoliberalism is the major reason why Africa, and Ghana in particular, is perpetually stagnated to take off for sustainable progress into development. The political and economic history of Ghana must be re-written to identify individuals of our own who, one way or another, led the country astray. Systematically, we have been reduced, aided by our own leaders, to re-enslavement with a subtly infiltration of a 'demonic' political philosophy championed by the IMF and sponsored by western powers called Neoliberalism.

We have been hit by the ECONOMIC HITMAN unaware up to-date, but we can wake-up because it is not too late! One important question is:

HOW MANY OF OUR POLITICAL (SO-CALLED) ELITES/STATESMEN KNOWINGLY OR UNKNOWINGLY SOLD OUR ECONOMIC LIBERTIES TO NEOLIBERALISM FOR PERSONAL GAINS?

We have been playing dumb as a nation for a very long time with organisations like the IMF in particular. If you loved Ghana as you claim, and want to find out the source of our problems, you need to embark on a journey with open-mindedness to analyse the kind of relationship the western NEOLIBERALISM agenda has established with the changing phases and faces of our past political leaders. Then, we can ascertain when to clearly identify in future, when a president or important members of any government is showing signs that they have been compromised.

For instance, in my field as an IT Security Consultant, I need to understand the ways and tricks of hackers to be able to identify at an instant a hacking activity online or on a network as soon as it occurs. In the same way, all true patriots and loyalists of Mother Ghana must research into the forces that fight against our progress into development as a sovereign state, both internally and externally.

MOST OF THE PROBLEMS GHANA IS GOING THROUGH NOW IS BECAUSE OF WHAT NEEDED TO BE DONE TO RE-SHAPE ALL THE DIFFERENT AREAS THAT WELL MAKE OUR DEMOCRACY WORTHWHILE TO ESTABLISH A SELF-RELIANT SOVEREIGN STATE IN PRACTICE, BUT SADLY WAS NOT DONE BETWEEN JAN 2001-JAN 2009, WHEN WE HAD THE BEST OPPORTUNITY AFTER 19 YEARS UNDER DICTATORSHIP.

Ghana is a strategic country in the ECOWAS sub-region. Whoever is incharge of the country is very important to the western powers and our so-called our trade partners. Our country's leadership has constantly compromised itself significantly to the demands of these supposed trading partners and donor partners with cash they create out of nothing mostly, and only in electronic format, to impose a political philosophy those advocates support economic liberalizations, free trade and open markets, privatization, deregulation, and enhancing the role of the private sector in modern society. Of cause I believe in the private sector but a regulated one with a proper intensive an at the same time extensive relationship between state and industries.

You see, the reason why President John Dramani Mahama will find it difficult to succeed as a president is not simply because of the gargantuan level of corruption and fiscal mismanagement under his leadership but other factors which ironically help to create this situation. The Economic Hitman seems to be part of Ghana's artificially created stagnation and all that we are doing is dancing to their songs and not analysing the forces working against our sovereignty and self-reliance.

This brings me to the reasons why I was against the HIPC, which is quite different from the normally partisan fueled posture employed by most of the 'against-HIPC' advocates in Ghana especially from the ruing party, because their reasons are flimsy and misguided. I think the HIPC was only designed to CONTINUE keeping countries like Ghana under the control of the western powers and their multinationals as a continuation of the SAP by the IMF/WB in the 70s and 80s which comes with adverse conditionalities to achieve self-reliance. So one may ask:

Why how to we wean ourselves our of these tentacles and grips of neocolonialism? I will delve just a little bit into how it started. First of all, let's remind ourselves of the termed coined by our of our own greatest visionary of the 'black-man' and Africa in general, NEOCOLONIALISM:

"Neocolonialism is the geopolitical practice of using capitalism, business globalization, and cultural imperialism to influence a country, in lieu of either direct military control or indirect political control, i.e. imperialism and hegemony.

The term neo-colonialism was coined by Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, to describe the socio-economic and political control that can be exercised economically, linguistically, and culturally, whereby promotion of the culture of the neo-colonist country facilitates the cultural assimilation of the colonized people and thus opens the national economy to the multinational corporations of the neo-colonial country."

This is what sets Dr. Kwame Nkrumah apart from the rest. He foresaw what could happen 50 years ago, and is happening to us now. But we helped extinguished a true shining star of Africa. That is a topic for another day.

Let's get back to HIPC:
Third-world debt in the past had largely been as a result of corruption of unaccountable regimes. Many loans officially meant for infrastructure projects, often found their way into the pockets of top government officials and their cronies and families ending up in off-shore accounts back in the first world. Much of the third world's present debt running into trillions of dollars, accrued interest on the original loans or on refinanced versions of them. (This also brings us to the evils of the global monetary system).

Third-world debt is administered by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which are largely controlled by the G-7 governments. These two institutions were created to finance the reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II and to rebuild and stabilize the international payments system. It was Ronald Reagan's administration, seconded by Britain's Margaret Thatcher, that infused them with a neoliberal economics ideology and sent them in to micro-manage developing countries economies. They sought to reduce the role of the state and increase the role of the private international investment sector in these countries' economic development.

The birth of MULTINATIONALS! After the SAP drew lots of criticisms and demonstrations in the 90s from pressure groups around the world arguing that the trade barrier reductions and subsidy cuts have wiped out domestic businesses, which could not compete with foreign multinational competitors; and that when a country's public utilities and state-owned companies are privatized, only foreign investors or the few domestic elites can afford to purchase them. They were right but unfortunately for developing countries another scheme was hatched to replace the SAP, HIPC!

The Debt-Relief Initiative for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries and commonly referred to as the HIPC initiative was announced by the G-7 countries. Yet, fraught with serious shortcomings and all-too-familiar strings attached, it is no different from the SAP and has been under fire by some of the biggest advocates of third-world debt cancellation once again.

In fact, with everything that is out there for critical thinkers to analyse, if you are a true patriot and concerned about the future prospects of Ghana and the prosperity of all the citizenry, then what should worry you is the conditions attached to IMF and World Bank loans which are completely the opposite of the policies of ALL industrialized economies in the past couple of centuries. Europe, the United States, Japan, and the Four Tigers of Asia (Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) all have employed economic policies that establish controlled partnership between industry and the central government.

True practised industrialization involves more of government providing protective trade barriers, large subsidies to domestic industry, support for public utilities and state-owned industries, tax breaks and other incentives for research and development to diversify the economy, and controls on currency and capital.

In fact, the World Bank's 2001 annual edition of Global Economic Perspectives and the Developing Countries, it pointed to one of the largest hypocrisies of all in global trading:

"The rich countries maintain high levels of trade barriers and subsidies for their own protection but force third-world governments to remove barriers and subsidies that support their industries. These prevent third-world goods from being sold in their markets. The effects of such hypocrisy have been disastrous."

ASK YOURSELF, WHY AND HOW ON EARTH WERE THESE FOLKS - and still - ABLE TO CONVINCE OUR LEARNED LEADERS AND MANAGERS OF OUR ECONOMY SINCE 1981 TO SUBSCRIBE TO SUCH DOSES OF POLICIES WHICH CAN ONLY HELP TO CONTINUE TO KEEP US GOING TO THEM FOR THEIR LEFT OVERS?

I will end here with a quote from one of our own presidential candidates who warned:

"About 30 years ago, some African nations, beginning with Ghana and Uganda, implemented liberal economic reforms to stop their economic decline. But in many cases we opened our markets to global competition when, beyond the extractive industries, we had nothing to compete with. So while the continent's share of global foreign direct investment projects has improved steadily over the past decade, much of this investment has reinforced the structural deficits of our economies."

God bless Mother Ghana With True Patriotic Leaders.

YK Amakye Ansah-Yeboah
Founding President CPAG
Common Purpose Alliance Ghana.
[email protected]
[email protected]