By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Speaking at a recent electioneering campaign forum in Accra, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo declared that a World Bank report – not from the Volta Region, by the way – indicating that roughly half of all Ghanaian youths ages between 15-24 years are unemployed, while more than 18-percent of Ghanaian adults ages between 25-64 years were actively looking for non-existent jobs was unacceptable (See “48% Unemployment Rate in Ghana Unacceptable – Akufo-Addo” Kasapafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/12/16).
It would have been far more effective if the three-time presidential candidate of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) had also released figures relating to the level of youthful and adult unemployment at the end of 2000, when President Jerry John Rawlings handed over the reins of governance to Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor. And, in particular, the measures that the newly elected President Kufuor put in place to remarkably reduce the rate of unemployment, as well as inflation, in the country.
Merely presenting a one-sided narrative on the grave state of the Ghanaian economy and the bleak state of unemployment in the country only offers prime opportunity for the cynical operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) to play their usual nauseating game of “Equalization.”
If the NPP leaders want their 8-year track record in government to be taken seriously, they must start doing the sort of comparative economic analysis that would objectively and healthily jog the memories of those who may have so soon forgotten how much existentially meaningful and significantly better it was to live in Ghana under the watch of President Kufuor.
Among the highlights of the policies of the period needing emphasizing are such social intervention programs as financial assistance for the very old, the perennially sick, nursing mothers and the clinically disabled. Then, of course, the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which has been literally botched and put on life-support by the Mills-Mahama regime, and now the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur government, ought to also be highlighted, with particular reference to how these quality-of-life improvement policies have been grossly incompetently handled by the NDC apparatchiks.
The smug and routine presumption by many an NPP leader that, somehow, the depressing socioeconomic conditions plaguing the country presently are pretty obvious, woefully underestimates the power of well-orchestrated propaganda, such as cynically and suavely disseminated in the national media by the Mahama Posse, aimed at confusing and afflicting the electorate with political amnesia.
In the news report on which this commentary is based, sourced to Kasapafmonline.com, the reporter claims that “successive governments failed to create jobs for new graduates entering the job market.”
This statement ought to be promptly and pointedly challenged by the Akufo-Addo Campaign, by pointing out that other than the 8-year period spanning between 2001 and 2009, most of the past 34-odd years have been effectively dominated by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, first as the brutal and merciless junta leader of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), and the democratically elected leader of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
Thus, what is being facilely labeled as “successive governments” is actually leaders of the same political machine playing a managerially incompetent and philosophically risible game of political musical chairs. The Kasapafmonline.com reporter also observes as follows: “Nonetheless, there is an absence of a viable private sector in Ghana to absorb the teeming [numbers of] unemployed youths” in the country.
This observation must also be promptly and poignantly challenged and the responsibility for such grossly incompetent management of the country’s economy squarely placed at the doorstep of the faux-socialist and anti-business leaders who have dominated Ghana’s political landscape since independence, namely Messrs. Kwame Nkrumah, Jerry John Rawlings, John Evans Atta-Mills and, presently, John Dramani Mahama.
The preceding, of course, is not to totally exonerate such short-lived democratically elected civilian administrations as the Busia-led Progress Party (PP) and the Babini Limann-led People’s National Party (PNP), as well as the Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) junta and, of course, the Kotoka-, Ankrah- and Afrifa-led National Liberation Council (NLC) junta that auspiciously overthrew the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) regime.
For example, Busia has been criticized for inopportunely enacting the sort of Eurocentric economic policies, largely dictated hook, line and sinker by the tandem institutions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) that did not pay studious attention to the peculiar neocolonial circumstances of the country. Similarly, Limann would be virulently accused by Chairman Rawlings of having visionlessly sold Ghana to the IMF-World Bank or the Bretton Woods establishment.
Ironically, barely two years after unseating President Limann, the Rawlings-led PNDC government would literally hand over the economy of Ghana to the same Bretton Woods establishment to be used as a guinea pig, in what became popularly known as the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP).
It goes without saying that the leaders of the New Patriotic Party could make their uphill battle for the Jubilee-Flagstaff House much easier, if they took control and dictated the terms of the 2016 electioneering campaign, rather than smugly ceding the higher moral and political ground to the Mahama Posse by, allowing their main political opponents to take the battle to them instead of vice versa.
Of course, on the latter count, one readily makes a significant exception of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the NPP’s 2016 vice-presidential candidate and former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana. Dr. Bawumia continues to relentlessly expose the so-called NDC Economic Management Team (EMT) for the blowhard charlatans that they have proven themselves to be before the Ghanaian electorate and the rest of the citizenry.
