Forgive us not our debtation
Posted by By Akogun Akomolafe at 10 February, at 14 : 00 PM Print
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Reports that Ghana’s debt has climbed above the seven billion dollars range is both worrisome and disheartening. Yours truly was among many who, few years back, wrote angry polemics against the onerous debt burden Africa was forced to carry.
Believing that our woes are finally over, we heaved sigh of relief when the movers and shapers of the world finally agreed to write off some of these debt. Meeting in Gleneagles in 2005, the conscience of the G8 leaders were sufficiently pricked for them to agree to write off 80 per cent of Ghana’s debts. Believing that we shall finally begin to use our resources to develop our economy, many of us danced with joy. Alas, our rulers are made from a different genetic pool from you and me.
That few years later, we are back to square one is very sad, indeed. So, those that charged themselves with managing our affairs have apparently learnt nothing! They kept on mis-managing our resources and keep on spin-doctoring the mess they are creating! Are we, in a few years time, to begin going around the world with our begging bowl pleading for our debts to be forgiven once again? Money doesn’t grow on tree as our leaders, who keep living beyond their means, obviously are unaware of. One way or the other, these debts have to be repaid. And with our country on the verge of joining oil-producing nations, no one will listen to us if we ask for debt forgiveness. So, we have actually mortgaged the nation’s posterity with our fiscal irresponsibilities.
Many economists argue that borrowing money in itself is not such a bad idea, if the borrowed money is invested properly to yield enough dividends to pay back the debt and get something more in return. Rescue me if I am wrong, but I do not see any enterprise our rulers set up that will enable us to pay back these debts.
Within the last few years, Ghana’s internally-generated revenues have increased to historic highs. Our people have been saddled with every description of taxation. Talking is no longer free in our dear land as our brilliant rulers have decided to impose air time tax on our mobile calls. Makes me wonder why they have not dreamt up the idea of taxing the very air that we breathe! Yet, with all these money accruing to the government’s purse, our debt has risen to historic proportions?
The saddest thing is that we have utilized all these funds apparently for recurrent expenditures, as there is still no visible industrialization taking place in our land. We certainly must be the only species of humanity that has absolutely no qualms whatever about borrowing money to build a presidential palace! A better idea would have been to borrow the money and build, say, a rail line from Accra to Kasoa. The generated revenue from such a project would have been sufficient to pay the loan back, build our presidential palace and we would still have our rail line – win, win situation all the way. Makes you wonder whether not our over-compensated elite are doing any thinking at all!
Ours is a poor nation, yet our elite continue to treat our treasury like war booty to be devoured at great speed. We have managed to turn our Executive Presidency into an Imperial one. The expensive cars in our President’s motorcade are among the most numerous in the world. And why on earth should a HIPCed country such as ours be giving cars loans to our parliamentarians remains a great mystery to yours truly? Come on, these fellows are already rich before they got there! And our Ministers are a class unto themselves. We are not only paying them salaries and other emoluments, we give them cars and we are helping to pay their housekeep! I repeat what I’ve written elsewhere here: The Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the Netherlands travel without pomp or pageantry, and he lives in HIS OWN HOUSE. Not even the Monarch of Holland, a rich country by all the standards known to statisticians, travel around in expensive motorcades.
Those nation that we today look up to as ‘advanced’ didn’t get their by pure chance. They were led there by leaders who see their offices as a call for national services. They were leaders who put their nation’s advancement above their personal aggrandizement. We learned from their biographies that they were leaders who prepared and equipped themselves intellectually before putting themselves forth. In his book ‘Why Not the best?,’ President Jimmy Carter tells us about the preparations he took before embarking on his journey to the White House.
And with all that they are collecting from the state’s kitty, our elite still continue to loot the little that’s left in the pot. Corruption in today’s Ghana is at all time high, despite all the presidential pontifications against corruption. The alleged misappropriation of 443 billion old Ghana Cedis (over $46 million) in 2007 is just the latest in a long string of malfeasances at high places. Nowadays, we no longer mention corruptions in the millions, it’s now strictly multi-billion. As Ben Ephson once put it: “In many cases, the unwritten rule of corruption in Ghana is chop, but chop big. For the uninitiated, chop is pidgin English for “eat,” so if you’re going to be corrupt, the thinking goes, take huge sums of money.” And how low our lots have sunk as a nation can been seen in the fact Ghana is now routinely mentioned among drug trafficking nation.
All these would not be a problem if our rulers are solving our developmental challenges, and making the quality of our lives better. I don’t know about you, but I, for one, do not think that things are better in today’s Ghana than they were eight years ago. The cost of living is literally and figuratively killing us. And gallingly, amidst the general impoverishment in the land, our elite continue to spend money as though it’s going out of fashion. With the exception of Tema, no city in our dear land has a decent public toilet. Our elite cannot, in their collective wisdom, think of building public libraries, parks and swimming pools where ordinary folks can chill down some of the stress of their impoverished lives!
It’s still my contention that until we Africans become passionate and agitated enough, our errant rulers will continue to take us for sweet rides and continue to treat us like colonial subjects. Election is coming up next year and what do we have but the same cabal of rotating politician making the same obstreperous noises. Or would one point to me where to locate Professor Mills detailed plan for Ghana on education, or Nana Akufo Addo’s detailed thoughts on how to revamp Ghana’s Agriculture, or the other candidates’ thoughtful ideas on regional integration, health, defense and the grinding poverty in our dear land. All that we are saddled with are more than useless party manifestoes – apparently copied and pasted with little alterations here and there.
We citizens should all strive to leave our society better than we met it; it is a responsibility we owe to posterity. And I believe that our civic responsibilities go well beyond casting votes on election days. It should involved letting those that are mis-ruling us and wasting our resources realize that we are angry, very angry. It involves those of us who can write to keep writing; those whose abilities lay in music to keep singing- we all should get involved. Ghana does not belong to the political class alone; it’s our patrimony. It also involves our demanding transparency at every level of governance. The yearly budget speeches are too obtuse even for the most educated among us. We should compel our rulers to publish our income and expenditure in PLAIN LANGUAGE and to put it on the internet. We can then inform ourselves where the leakages are. Details of every contract awarded by any department should also be made public, so that we can see the hanky-panky that’s going on. And these should be done at all levels of government – from District Assembly to Regional and National. Our rulers pretend to hold power in our behalf, I do not see why the records of our resources are not in the public domain.
Another thing we should seriously look at is our vast expenditure on our rulers. If, as they pretend, our rulers are really servant of the people why should they use the state’s resources to live at levels that are stratospherically higher than the rest of us? No Master would give his servant a car and house when he sleeps on the street and transport himself in the jalopies we call tro-tro. It shouldn’t the responsibility of the poor tax payer to give car loans to Parliamentarian or pay the telephone bill of Ministers.
It’s unconscionable for our rulers to keep asking us for sacrifices they are unprepared and unwilling to make for their nation. With our God-given resources, we have absolutely no business being hungry, being without decent shelter, without electricity and we need not be HIPC.
“Any economy theory that impoverishes people is doomed to failure.” Professor Adebayo Adedeji
About the Author
Femi Akomolafe is a passionate Pan-Africanist. A columnist for the Accra-based Daily Dispatch newspaper and ModernGhana, and Correspondent for the New African magazine, Femi lives in both Europe and Africa and writes regularly on Africa-related issues for various newspapers and magazines.
Femi was the producer of the FOCUS ON AFRICANS TV Interview programme for the MultiTV Station.
He is also the Man and Machine Coordinator at Alaye Dot Biz Limited, a Kasoa-based Multimedia organization that specializes in Audio and Video Production. He loves to shoot and edit video documentaries.
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