Times are really rough and tough the world all over and Ghana is also affected. No matter what, we need to find solutions.
It is like you reside in a village community and suddenly there is fire outbreak and every hut including yours is on fire.
You just don’t stand there and say, that once everybody’s hut is burning you would just watch yours burn down. You will find ways of quenching that fire.
Ghana is indeed burning and it might seem the leadership is completely out of ideas with such unannounced and unpredicted global economic crunch and momentarily, government may be confused in attempts to find solutions.
As if the government of Ghana knew the nation would really need to rely on internally generating funds from taxes, it introduced the E-Levy and boom, the opposition NDC went to town to convince every Ghanaian that E-Levy would make them poorer than they are today.
1.5% on GHc100.00 plus money transfer to the NDC, is going to impoverish the people of Ghana than the 17.5% VAT on Financial Transactions, it introduced while in power and implemented.
So, as it stands, most Ghanaians have chosen to travel to give physical cash to beneficiaries than they would, through MoMo. A journey that could cost over ten times or over hundred times more than total transaction charges through MoMo transfers.
The NDC had bent on making government seek help from the IMF, as if going to this Bretton Woods institution means surrounding up and declaring that one is incapable of governing.
Out of the seventeen times Ghana had gone to the IMF, the PNDC, under Rawlings, took us there six times; the NDC under Rawlings took us there twice and the NDC under Mills/Mahama also took us there twice. Is the NDC by its own yardstick saying that from Rawlings to Mills/Mahama it gave Ghana poor governance?
So, Ghana went to IMF and before we could be given seats and asked about our mission there, a certain Mona, once a deputy minister of Finance under an NDC regime, went to town to inform us that our finance minister was caught on paper given false reports of Ghana’s finances.
If it is so, then it was the tradition left behind by the NDC: the ability to lie to the Bretton Woods Institutions and give out false financial reports and returns.
At least it is on record that Jerry Rawlings and his NDC government lied to the IMF about Ghana’s economy. This was found out and Ghana was fined $ 36 million, during the first month of the Kufuor’s administration. This compounded the woes of the country.
And today, while negotiations are going on in Bretton Woods, the NDC members are on the speculation spree, drawing attention away from their economic mismanagement which is without peers here in Africa. If only the NDC will stop amplifying the problems and rather come with solutions, we would solve these problems together.
This NPP government was faring very well, with a six-year record of four times annual single digit inflation, 2018 to 2021, at 7.81%, 7.14%, 9.89% and 9.97% respectively. The first six years of the previous NDC regime, Ghana recorded single-digit inflation only once and that was in 2011, with 8.73%.
With the new virus and global pandemic called COVID-19, stripping out man power and productivity, in 2020, Ghana under Nana Akufo-Addo’s NPP fared much better than any NDC government.
Ghana registered its first case of cholera in 1970 and the largest epidemic to affect the country was in 2014, when 28,992 cases were recorded with 243 deaths. And this was in an NDC era. Incidentally, until 2014, the highest number of cholera cases recorded in a single year was 15,032 in 1982, which was in the era of the PNDC.
The NDC is making so much noise about Covid-19 as if it could have done anything better if it were in power. Even cholera, which has been with us since 1970, an NDC government could not resolve its outbreak and so how could it deal with a new pandemic like Covid-19? If only the NDC will stop amplifying Ghana’s problems when it knows it cannot suggest any solution, this country will be a better place.
With the global economic crunch, came depreciation of the cedi and high cost of importation of refined crude. The cedi which begun the year, 2022, at GH¢5.90 to $1.00 suddenly shot up beyond GH¢ 14.05 by the end of October.
The hardships, called for people to ask whether the government was capable of handling affairs of this country. One person who was pounced upon and with calls for his exit from the scene was the finance minister, Ken Ofori-Atta.
For the first time in the history of this country, MPs from government side held a press conference to demand and serve ultimatum to the president to release a minister and a minister of state from government.
H.E. Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo met with the over eighty MPs from his own party and pledged that he would show Ken Ofori-Atta the exit after he had performed three important functions.
These are, completing negotiations with the IMF, reading the budget in Parliament and after the passing of the Appropriation Bill. However, this is not the first time, members of government had asked their president to sack a finance minister.
In 2014, after serving for only two years as finance minister, Hon Seth Terkper, did not perform well in office and supervised the collapse of the economy without any external forces, no global economic meltdown. He was finance minister when Ghana entered into over three years of power outages, which was named dumsor, a word which has now gained international prominence and entered into the English dictionary.
Hon Seth Terkper came to meet inflation at 11.19% and nurtured it in a steady growth to 11.67% and 15.49% by the end of 2013 and 2014 respectively. Seth Terkper inherited an external debt of $11.9 bn and by the end of 2014 he increased this debt stock $17.8 bn. What was he doing with all that money?
According to the Institute of Statistical Social and Economic Research (ISSER), Seth Terkper and the NDC government borrowed to pay debts and so successfully collapsed the economy when there was no global economic meltdown.
Unlike H.E. Nana Akufo-Addo, then President John Mahama did not see the need to get rid of his non-performing minister when intense pressure was mounted on him to sack Seth Terkper.
He had this to say in response, “I do not think sacking the finance minister will change anything in Ghana, probably sacking the entire government may make a difference.
The compounding problems of Ghana is not being caused by the dealings of one person – the finance minister.”President John Mahama saw Seth Terkper to be doing the right thing for the economy, though it may be bad for politics.
In comparison, records show that Hon. Ken Ofori-Atta is a better finance minister than Hon. Seth Terkper. For the past five years, Ken had been handling the economy better. He took inflation down from the 17.45% (2016) to 12.37% (2017) after one year in office.
Then from 2018, inflation was recorded in single-digits until the global economic crunch of 2022, shooting inflation up to 40.4% in the month of October. Indications are annual inflation for 2022 could be between 27.00% and 31.00%.
But for not being pro-active enough like Kufuor and his finance minister did in 2008, to come out with means to cushion Ghanaians, Hon. Ken Ofori-Atta has to go. At least he could have learnt how to manage the economy in such a crisis from his own party. Did he refuse to listen to people like Akoto Osei and Gyan Baffour?
One thing which is very significant here is that, the president has heard the demands of his party and has decided to do what they wished for. Kudos, Nana Addo, we know how difficult it is to punish your own kinsman. You have shown the calibre of person you are.
The fact that John Mahama was not able to get rid of Seth Terkper, when his party members asked him to, demands that the NDC must stop making noise about Ken Ofori-Atta and stop amplifying the problems since it has no solutions to suggest.
While all these things are going on, and even with the president promising to give his finance minister and another the sack, we had a seasoned lawyer called Martin Kpebu reliving the Kume Preko days and organised what he called Kume Preko Reload, in anticipation of getting at least half a million people on the streets to tell the president what he had already accepted to do, to get rid of his finance minister.
With so much noise about this demonstration and the fact that Ghanaians are in dire straits one thought that half of Accra would have jumped to the beat. However, the turn-up was like the number of people you see waiting in the rain for trotro or bus.
And Martin Kpebu without shame had the effrontery to declare the Speaker of Parliament as the next president. And this is a lawyer who should know the Constitution and it is that, economic mismanagement is not one of the criteria of removing a president. And also, there is no where in the Supreme Law that both president and his vice can be removed.
Then came a presidential candidate in perpetuity, Akwasi Addae Odike of the United Progressive Party, who has declared that by January 2023, he would stage a coup and remove Nana Addo and Bawumia from office, uprooting them like how he uproots cassava from his farm. Martin Kpebu, Odike and the likes of Kwasi Pratt Jnr who are suggesting that time is ripe for coup, must stop amplifying our problems if they have nothing good to suggest as solutions.
The minority in the Parliamentary Sub-Committee on Trade and Industry seems to have decided that they will make sure, they rubbish this flagship policy, 1D1F and so they could come on air and declare that they have not seen any factory that has been put up under this policy. Shockingly the reasons given was that the committee has not been resourced to go on such working visits, so it cannot tell whether there are factories or not. These are MPs talking, NDC MPs talking. They are just amplifying problems that are not there and are not volunteering any solutions.
A finance minister who performed worse than his immediate successor and was asked to step down but supported by his president, is today coming out to teach people how to manage this country’s finances. This can only happen in Ghana with the NDC around.
Hon. Daniel Dugan
