FLASHBACK: Joseph Cudjoe's 10 answers to how Ghana can become an economic giant

The Minister of Public Enterprises, Joseph Cudjoe, made some suggestions towards ensuring that Ghana bounces from the current economic crisis.

According to him, Ghana does not deserve to be broke.

“How can we export Gold, bauxite, manganese, coal, timber, oil etc. and go broke and continue to find ourselves in this situation?” the Member of Parliament for Effia constituency wondered.

Read the full story originally published on September 21, 2022, by GhanaWeb

The Minister of Public Enterprises, Joseph Cudjoe, has proffered a number of solutions aimed at boosting Ghana’s position as an industrial nation and a self-reliant economy in the world.

The country is at present facing a number of economic challenges which have been caused by both internal and external factors such as the depreciation of the cedi, revenue generation constraints, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the fallouts of the Russia-Ukraine war, among others.

While the major cause of these factors may be debatable, the Public Enterprises Minister believes Ghana can adopt a number of measures that can propel the Ghanaian economy.

In a statement made available to GhanaWeb, Joseph Cudjoe called for the reorganizing and restructuring of the Ghanaian economy.

“How can we export Gold, bauxite, manganese, coal, timber, oil etc. and go broke and continue to find ourselves in this situation?” the Member of Parliament for Effia constituency wondered.

He also called for a rethink of the educational system in order to ensure it moves beyond just theory and rhetoric, to achieve much more in order to improve economic development by leveraging on vast natural resources.

Read the full statement below:

REORGANIZING AND RESTRUCTURING OF GHANA’S ECONOMY - WHAT THE YOUNGER GENERATION SHOULD BE TAUGHT

Good morning, folks. For the past three to four days, I’ve had an intense engagement with my “A’-Level Classmates on our WhatsApp platform. It’s been an interesting and productive interaction. I learnt that what we’ve been taught early days in school is what we continue to believe in our current stations in life, in spite of real-world evidence pointing to the contrary. The question below came up from the engagements and I would like to share my response to the question with you;

THE QUESTION:

Joe, let me ask this ignorant question. Maybe it'll give you the opportunity to expand your ECONS 101 lecture.

How can we export Gold, bauxite, manganese, coal, timber, oil etc. and go broke and continue to find ourselves in this situation?

1. TIMBER: Do not expect a country that cut and sell big trees in the 21st century to be a rich country. Cutting and selling trees called timber from natural forest is primitive. Note that the country that buys the trees (timber) and processes them into wood products and sell back to the primitive economy will be the rich country.

2. BAUXITE: Don’t expect a country that scoops a type clay from the ground and sell in the 21st Century to be rich. The country that buys the clay and refines it into alumina and then to Aluminium and then produce Aluminium products from it will be the rich country and the one that export the “mere clay” called bauxite will remain poor.

3. GOLD: A country that digs the ground and looks for a certain type of rocks that bears gold and then uses poisonous chemicals like cyanide, arsenic and mercury to search for unrefined gold and sell it is doing a primitive job. The country that buys the unrefined gold, refines it, assays it, and produces high valued jewels or uses the gold as reserves to back its currency will be the rich country. The one doing the primitive job of mining the gold will perpetually be poor.

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4. OIL: A country that doesn’t have its own capital to risk and explore for its own crude oil and when it finds one, appraise it by itself and finance the development of the crude oil production facilities and then produce and sell will be the poor one. On the contrary, the country that can raise tha risk capital which is used to search for oil and can also raise the capital required for developing the production facilities will be a richer country than the country which merely has the crude oil under the sea/ground but cannot bring it out by itself.

5. MANGANESE: Manganese is also a type of rock we mine and sell these rocks primitively just like we were doing during Guggisberg’s time in the 1920s. Manganese is used to produce a variety of important alloys and to deoxidize steel and and as desulfurizer. It is also used in dry cell batteries. Further, Manganese is also used as a black-brown pigment in paints. Of all these industrial uses of manganese, we do not carry out a single one here as a country. If you ask even tertiary students in Ghana the uses of manganese, they wouldn’t even know. Meanwhile, primitively, we still dig the grounds for the rock and sell and expect to be rich. Unfortunate

6. COCOA: Kofi, you didn’t add cocoa but let me say that a country that clears the bush, plants a tree, waits for three years or more for the tree to bear fruits and then go through a laborious series of tasks to crack the pods, dry the beans, bag the beans and haul them to the ports to sell to other countries to process them in few days and rather sell at higher values, is just doing a primitive economic activity. You can’t expect to be rich.

7. From the points 1 to 6 above, you realize that we are in this world today in 2022 (Two Thousand and Twenty Two Years) after the death of Christ) still largely undertaking SLOW, PRIMITIVE AND LESS VALUED ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES and using the little proceeds of foreign exchange to import FAST FACTORY PRODUCED ITEMS like petrol, diesel, phones, cars, Aluminium products, electrical products, electronic products, bottles, computers, Tyres, drinks, aboboyaa , motor cycles, chocolate drinks, photo frames, clothes, paints, footwears, steel, automobiles, air conditioners, machine tools, pizza and other food items, etc, etc.

8. Unfortunately, we expect to be a rich country from our primitive economic activities. Your cedi will continue to fall saaaa until you understand what President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is doing through the Alan driven 1D1F program and Vice President Bawumia driven Ghana Card and Digitalization program to solve pretty much robustly and “permanently” the unemployment and frequent country-broke, frequent IMF, and the weak cedi we have always had.

9. Our education system and our old economists should stop teaching we export this, we export that and all that primitive economic stuffs and psyche all of us to move in the direction of high value economic activities like factory production, service deliveries and technological innovations and deployment. I’m personally sick and tired of hearing we export this, we export that when the exports are just clay, rocks, metals, beans, and some crude liquid.

10. This is what we should use the over 500 FM stations in Ghana to teach ourselves and deploy or educational facilities to achieve. Mindset changing time is here, KOFI.

Thanks for the question!

HON JOSEPH CUDJOE

MP FOR EFFIA CONSTITUENCY

MINISTER FOR PUBLIC ENTERPRISES

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