Bailing Ghana From Its Economic Mess

For quite some time, the average Ghanaian has not been able to make ends meet. That is a fact.  All over the country, the ability to provide the basics of life has been a daily struggle for many heads of households.

In spite of the reality on the ground, political overlords pretend to provide for the people. Roof-top advertisement of creating a 'Better Ghana' continues to assail our ears at a time when basic services to the poor and vulnerable are being denied.

On Monday, the Centre for Democratic Development, an Accra-based civil society think thank released a report it commissioned into how the government has been successful or not with its economic brief and its impact on the people.

The research also probed into how well state policy has been prioritized to improve the living conditions of the people. The result is damning. A staggering 73 percent of Ghanaians described the economy as very or fairly bad. As many as 65 percent of respondent said their living conditions were bad.

At the official presentation in Accra on Tuesday, Mr. Daniel Armah Attoh, a Senior Research fellow of CDD, said Ghanaians were worried about their own living conditions and the danger the worsening economy posed to their lives.

“Ghanaians place unemployment, electricity and education on the top priority policy list they want the 2016 polls to address. Yet a clear majority assesses government performance in addressing their policy priority negatively,” the research fellow said.

The state of the economy is nothing to write how about. Research upon research has established that central government has not been successful in ameliorating the plight of the ordinary Ghanaian.

On the other hand, the fleet of cars that glide along the poor road network in the convoy of government officials doing the rounds in the country clearly suggests that state resources continue to be misapplied.

The Auditor General continues to churn out annual reports of misapplication of state resources and outright stealing on the part of those appointed by the state to supervise over the use of funds and other resources of state.

Like ostriches, we the ordinary people of the state, overlook the problem by burying our heads in the sand while state resources are looted in broad daylight.

The Chronicle is inviting all political parties to address this social canker in their various manifestoes, as we get ready for the 2016 Presidential and Legislative elections.

In other words, we are inviting political heads and their policy drafters to craft the idea of how they intend to manage state resources for the people of Ghana to study in order to make informed choices at the polls.

The bare fact is that this nation is not sitting pretty at all.  In various homes across the centre of the earth, putting one meal of any standard on the dining table is a problem.

Our political parties have a duty to carve a manifesto that would address the dire economic situation in the country. When this nation broke free of the colonial yoke, much noise was made about the fact that the British 'imperialists' had made the people hewers of wood and carriers of water.

In other words, we charged the colonial masters with deliberately creating an economic environment in which this country and most other African nations exported raw materials without adding value to our export commodities.

IN March 2017, Ghana will celebrate 60 years of nationhood. The sad truth is that we have not succeeded in adding value to our export commodities since independence. A few attempts were made in exporting cocoa products for instance.

But the dreadful news is that even the little we were doing to improve the primary commodities we export, have whittled away.

Quite recently, news was doing the round that our cocoa processing plants were unable to obtain local cocoa beans for procession. Ghana, once the leading cocoa producing nation in the world, had to import raw cocoa beans from La Cote d'Ivoire.

As a nation, we have built more castles in the air than on the ground. The Chronicle is challenging political parties contesting the 2016 elections – particularly the ruling National Democratic Congress and the opposition New Patriotic Party- the two political edifices with the realistic chance of forming the next government to evolve an economic policy to take this nation from this economic mess.

Propaganda has taken us nowhere. Let officials contesting the polls burn the midnight oil and come out with realistic policies to bail this nation from its economic mess.