The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) or World Bank, are the world’s major banks. The following are the major differences between IMF and the World Bank:
The IMF is a controller of the world’s monetary system. The World Bank is a global financial institution; the IMF focuses on bringing economic stability, whereas the World Bank laid emphasis on economic growth of the developing nations and the IMF is a unitary organization while the World Bank is bilateral organisation.
The IMF came into existence to provide advice and assistance. Conversely, the World Bank is created to facilitate lending; the major objective of the IMF is to deal with matters related to the financial sector and macroeconomics and on the other hand, the purpose of the World Bank is to reduce poverty and to promote economic development.
The IMF and World Bank are the two Bretton Woods Institution formed in 1944. There are many things in common, in these two international organizations. Both of them supports the international monetary and economic system. Almost all the countries of the world are the members of these two organizations.
Even though these two important financial institutions were set up to help out developing nations, they have become points of last resort, because of the draconian measures the IMF will use to help structure financial problems of countries and the peanuts the World Bank will give as loans to help such countries back up on their feet.
For example, when a country approaches the IMF for assistance, it is most likely be told to put a halt on public sector employment, withdraw subsidies on agriculture, put a stop to social interventions like health insurance, free education among others. Now after this the country is set to go to the IBRD for loans to use it to whip up its economy. And here, if that country needs at least $ 3 billion to do good work and get good results, the World Bank will only give a tenth, that is $ 300 million.
The truth of the matter is that the West and other developed countries will never want developing countries to get to their level and so they will do everything possible to make sure that we remain down there. While they keep advancing and get richer and richer, using our minerals and natural resources, which they buy cheaply, to create wealth for themselves, we wallow in poverty.
Who is to blame for this? Among ourselves we go on to treat our poor peasant farmers the same. We buy their produce below the production cost and this ends up making the producer to subsidize the consumer. For example, wholesale price of tomatoes at farm gate which is at GH¢ 300.00 will be sold threefold in the markets at GH¢ 900.00. We do it to our own, and the White man does same to us.
So, who is to blame for our predicament? Casting my thoughts as far back to 2000 BC, there was once a very powerful Black African, empire, the Nubian empire called Kush which ruled Egypt in the 25th Dynasty. Then to the Land of Punt, somewhere in East Africa around 1500 BC. There was Carthage which was Rome’s bitterest rival and located in modern day Tunisia; and the Aksum kingdom which was located somewhere around Eritrea and was a very powerful nation with naval power unrivalled by any other, at that time. Then comes the Mali Empire, which had the first university in the world, Sankore Timbuktu University, where students from Europe came down to study. Mali was synonymous with Mansa Musa, the emperor and richest man to date, worth over $400 billion in gold alone at that time. Then there was the Songhai Empire also a once powerful nation with vigorous trade policies and a sophisticated bureaucratic system. The modern-day legal system evolved from the Songhai empire.
There are a lot more, like the Great Zimbabwe, the Benin empire, the Ghana Empire and others. However, the one kingdom which has made Ghana proud, is the Asante kingdom, which had running battles against the British, winning some and losing some, until it finally succumbed to the White in 1900 AD and was ruled indirectly from the Gold Coast, with the Asantehene as the “prime minister.” This went on till March 1957 when Asanteman became integral part of Ghana.
At the time when Europe was in its dark ages, Africa, Black Africa, was a place where great empires flourished with some becoming world super powers.
So, what actually went wrong and the tables turned since late August, 1619, when about thirty enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort, today’s Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, aboard the English ship, White Lion, for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to begin?
Today the descendants of powerful nations, in fact world super powers, militarily, in commence, in education and in administration, have been reduced to third class citizens in the world, third class, because we are classified as third world nations.
I believe what happened to us, is some Internally Motivated Faults (IMF) we always readily and willingly inflict on ourselves and worse of all even though these faults are not helping us, we take pride in motivating them in our ways of life.
We allowed the West to come down here to take over our minerals and natural resources and giving us about 5% of the exploits and we sit down clapping that we made a good deal. Kaiser, after agreeing to construct the Akosombo Dam, not for free by the way, decided to establish an aluminium smelter factory in Ghana. The company made us agree to allow them pay only a third of the commercial rate for electricity and on top, it was not going to use bauxite found in Ghana, but import the ore from another African country. And we smiled gratefully to them.
They lured us into signing a binding agreement to import over $300 million worth of chicken annually, about 180,000 MT or five million chickens each week. And come to think of it, we were having a booming poultry industry which if allowed to progress, Ghana would have been a net exporter of chicken. Well, Rawlings told Ghanaians not to patronise chicken produced in Ghana and went ahead and signed us into that WTO binding agreement. Today, we produce only 14.5% of our national requirement or 58,000 MT of the annual demand of 400,000 MT.
We import over $390 million worth of riceannually, into this country, when at one time we exported rice to neighbouring African countries. And we import, $151 million worth of sugar, annually. Meanwhile we once produced sugar in this country. And we import over $200 million worth of wheat, annually into the country.
In all we spend over $ 1 billion annually to import things we could produce in this country. In the case of wheat, we can produce better substitutes which are more nutritious and healthier, like sorghum, millet, maize and cassava.
In the case of chicken, Ghana can start poultry breeding in this country and one fine gentleman, Dr. Okli, who is a specialist in that field, is waiting for support. The chickens that we import are in fact descendants of the local fowls we have here, which run around the place. They are what is called the pedigree stock, from which broilers and layers are bred through a long tedious process, spanning four years, from the pure pedigree stock to great grandparents, to grandparents, to parents and finally to commercial stock. It can be done in Ghana because the pedigree stocks are natives of the tropics, the local fowls, which we have in abundance here.
Covid -19 was a wake-up call to Black Africa that we need to look around what God put in our lands and use them for food and medicine. God so love us that He made sure Africa was not affected by the virus the way some Western countries were. And yet we never showed appreciation, by using what He has given us to cure and to prevent the pandemic. We chased after Western medicine for cure, at a cost.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine and we have started starving becauseUkraine with a land size of 600,000 square kilometres, exports $2.9 billion worth of agricultural products to Africa, a land size of over 30 million square kilometers.The bulk of them is wheat, which makes up 48%; then maize, yes, maize which makes up 31%, with the rest including sunflower oil, barley and soybeans. Now with the war going on, we are starved of food we could easily produce in Africa.Why should it be so?
Unless, we wake up and accept that we can never catch up with the rest of world if we continue to depend on the West and developing nations; we shall always internally motivate faults (IMF) that will continue to drag us down.
And to think that one day we were actually masters of the world, super powers and developed nations; to think that it was our own who were enslaved to build up the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, doing the jobs for free, except for a bowl or two of meal a day, and a dungeon to sleep for a room; to think that it is our natural and mineral resources that enriched these developed countries, while we remain poorer and poorer and to think that we allowed ourselves to have our minds controlled by the rich nations, should make us soberly reflect on our future and the future of our generations yet unborn, and resolve to come out of this, using our own minds, resources and start developing from there.
It will surely take a long time to get ourselves back to the top and even longer to become the richest and most powerful in the world again, like the days of the kingdoms and empires mentioned above. But it will be worth it if we start something.
And certainly, we will likely be going to the IMF, there is nothing wrong with doing so, after all we have been to IMF seventeen times, NLC (4); SMC II (1); PNDC (6); NDC regimes (5); NPP, JAK (1), and including NPP (NADAA) once. But next time when we do, let us have a strong bargaining power to enter into at least, a sixty-forty agreement in our favour, rather than going along with our own internally motivated faults to face the IMF, as losers, begging for left-over crumbs from the plates of well fed dogs kept in a rich White man’s home.
Hon. Daniel Dugan.
