Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr., has expressed disappointment in the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, as he drives Ghana to the International Monetary Fund(IMF) for a bailout.
The President, in a statement issued by the Minister of Information, has directed the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta to "commence formal engagements" with the IMF, "inviting the Fund to support an economic program put together by the Government of Ghana".
Seeking Solace Under IMF
Explaining this economic program for which Ghana runs back to the IMF despite the President's vow never to take the country to this international financial institution which endeared many Ghanaians to elect him to be the Head of State, the Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, in an interview on Peace FM's morning show 'Kokrokoo' on Monday, July 4, 2022 stated that their kind of going to the IMF is for a "balance of payment" to shore up the economy unlike the erstwhile Mahama administration.
" . . when the country was handed over to former President Mahama, there was no external global crisis. It was his own domestic management but at the end, he said to us that they have chewed the meat to the bone, so they are going to the Fund for bailout. This is his words, not mine. What tended up happening is that when they went for the bailout and we came into power, from 2017 to 2019, we saw how the Ghanaian economy performed.
"Today, our economic state has called for us to also go for bailout but it's a different scenario. It's not our internal domestic management that is the cause but the external issues and external pressures that have necessitated our decision to go for this facility," he expounded.
IMF Bailout Equals Guggisberg Economy?
Discussing the issue during 'Kokrokoo' on Tuesday, July 5, Kwesi Pratt alluded to President Akufo-Addo's promise not to send Ghana back to the economic environment pervading during the colonial era of Brigadier-General Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg and wondered if going to the IMF doesn't defeat the promise.
It would be recalled that in the first term of his presidency, President Akufo-Addo told Diplomats at a meeting that the country has outgrown the status of exporting commodities in their raw state without adding value.
“Sadly, however, the structure of our economy has not changed substantially since the era of Governor Gordon Guggisberg – an exporter of raw materials with little or no value-addition activities. This is why I have called our economy the Guggisberg economy,” he lamented, whiles promising that his “government’s economic vision will focus on executing an integrated industrialisation programme, with a clear bias towards supporting our small and medium scale enterprises with access to science and technology, incentives and markets to make them more productive and competitive.”
It is in this light that Mr. Pratt asked; "Are we not going back to the Guggisberg economy today with this IMF bailout?"
To him, the IMF is not a solution to Ghana's problems because history has proven time over time that any moment the country went for an IMF facility, the economy turned worse.
Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana
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All intellectually honest observants and non-NDC politically biased Ghanaians would agree with me that the NPP-governments in the Fourth Republic are so far the only governments that have made concerted efforts to transform the colonial Guggisberg economic system. The policies like 1D1F, transformation of the railway system, planting for food, and FHS are clearly the obvious initiatives initiated to transform the colonial economic system. Meanwhile, the NDC, as a political party in the Fourth Republic, was given more chances to form a government, but there is little evidence of any specific effort by it to transform the colonial system. Ghanaians have had just too much of Kwesi Pratt's populistic and intellectually dishonest positions to make any responsible meaning for the national good. Yes, it is true that Ghana is going through hard times, but the government has not done badly at all and I bet the situation would have been worse off if the NDC was in power.
It’s people like you who advise JDM. No wonder he is so incompetent
Uuncle Kwesi Pratt, you are just a propagandist.
Oh Uncle Kwesi you are an elder statesman and renowned journalist. So you do not understand Guggisberg economy? In that economy we produce raw materials and export them. Now many industries, factories in the country use most of our raw materials. Now 40% of the cocoa we produce are fed into the local industries. Egypt has ran to the IMF for $15 billion to cushion their economy. Those big economies like US, Britain,France,Germany, etc have printed over $18 trillion currency. We cannot do that because we may not turn things around easily.