Maybe before incoming Government takes office in Ghana, its members should be subjected – by a constitutional requirement-- to an intensive course of study, into Ghana’s economic history. For “institutional memory” is one of the worst casualties of amnesia in our public life.
Well, right now, what we should do is to keep quiet and allow our negotiators to do their best to reach an accommodation with the IMF. I once described the organisation as the personification of the Ghanaian proverb, which says:
Asantrofie anomaa
Wofa no a,
Woafa mmusuo;
Wogyae no nso a,
Woagyae sadeἑ !
[Translation: The Asantrofie bird is a taboo which brings you bad luck if you pick it up but which you can’t leave behind because it is of great value!]
Yep! The Breton Woods institutions, of which the IMF is one, were established after the Second World War, to ram “capitalist values” (surely an oxymoron?!} down the throats of the world. I mean, even a former British Prime Minister, the late Harold Wilson, once likened them to the “gnomes of Zurich!”
Ghana, listen: institutions like the IMF do not do pity. Nor sympathy. Nor learn from the history of the effect of their decisions on millions of “The Wretched Of The Earth”. If we go to them, we must have our eyes fully open. And our mouths tightly shut!
What should we have done in the past two years or so? We should have been laying aside some money to make our economy as self-sufficient as possible. Add value to our exports, and . DO that with DEEDS not WORDS.
We have been saying that we need to add value to our exports for so many years. But do we find our chocolates on the shelves of the shops of the rich countries? These countries still buy raw cocoa from us.
The current CEO of the Cocobod, Mr Boahen, laments that there is a shortage of cocoa in Ghana and the Ivory Coast today. Yet the price paid for cocoa by the chocolate manufactures is still low! Mr Boahen, where have you been? That is the name of the game. You and your Ivorian counterpart must recruit a mole from Hershey!
Yes, years ago, when Ghana’s cocoa industry was threatened with the “swollen shoot” disease, an excellent scheme, “Cocoa Rehabilitation” , was implemented by the Gold Coast Department of Agriculture to pay cocoa farmers to allow diseased cocoa trees to be cut out so that the industry could be saved. It worked: in less than two decades, our cocoa production had increased at least five-fold.
And the price fell disastrously to an unprecedented level!
That was our reward!