Cautiously Optimistic about World Bank’s Support of Ghana

The track-record of the so-called Bretton-Woods establishment, namely, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is so spotty that the recent assurance given by the World Bank’s Vice-President for the Africa Region, Mr. Makhtar Diop, to staunchly support the development policies of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo comes as “pure jazz” to me (See “‘We Support Your Vision’ – World Bank Veep Tells Akufo-Addo” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/4/17). But, of course, I am not pathologically cynical to the damnable point of paralysis. Indeed, it pays to have some modicum of faith in these two global financial institutions and to keep one’s fingers crossed, as it were.

Indeed, whenever I hear the names of the IMF and the World Bank, the first name that flashes through my mind is that of my late Distinguished Professor and immortalized Nigerian novelist, essayist and thinker Mr. Chinua Achebe. The latter was a very bitter critic of these twin global financial institutions, and was firmly of the view that any African countries that wanted to chalk an appreciable modicum of success needed to stay as far away as possible from these Bretton-Woods establishments which, by the way, were primarily established to cater to the development needs of the Aryan-West, in Trumpian parlance, of course.

Recently, though, I have somewhat converted to the view that the IMF and the World Bank in the past had not been of great use and benefit to African governments because the leaders of these governments, themselves, for the most part, had been made up of megalomaniacal and intransigent dictators who blindly and doggedly pursued faux-socialist policies that were not in synch with the proverbial temper of the times to healthily and seriously grow their economies.

On the other hand, Nana Akufo-Addo comes to the scene with a remarkable appreciation for the sort of economies for which the IMF and the World Bank were established to help succeed. But even more significantly, President Akufo-Addo has assembled some of the best and brightest economists on his team or cabinet, including Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, a former Deputy-Governor of the country’s treasury, the Bank of Ghana, with experience working with the Bretton-Woods establishment; and then Mr. Kenneth Ofori-Atta, the Finance Minister, who is also a pioneering expert of the country’s investment market. Then, there is also, of course, Mr. Yaw Osafo-Maafo, President Akufo-Addo’s Senior Minister, and the man widely acknowledged to have been the foremost “economic magician” behind the great success story of the Kufuor Administration. The list is almost inexhaustible.

What is important to note here is the need for the Akufo-Addo government to accept help, wherever it may come from, but with the perfect understanding of the fact that in the final analysis, it is us, Ghanaians, who are and must be the authors of our own collective national destiny. Besides, as a political party whose credo is the humanistic promotion of “A Property-Owning Democracy,” it ought not to be difficult, at all, for the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party to work with like-minded global financial institutions like these two Bretton-Woods establishments.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
August 15, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]