Wolfowitz greeted with blackouts at KIA

When the World bank President, Paul D. Wolfowitz breezed into town on the evening of March 2, 2007, four days before Ghana celebrated her 50th Anniversary, he was greeted with a power blackout at no other place than the VVIP lounge of the Kotoka International Airport (KIA).

About ten seconds before Paul Wolfowitz stepped into the lounge to address the media the whole airport went dark. The incident, which was not a new development to Ghanaians, however surprised newsmen who were at the airport to cover the arrival of the world Bank President because they least expected the Kotoka International Airport, touted as the ‘gateway to Africa’ to suffer the same fate they experience in their daily lives.

It was however, a development which some saw as symbolic and perhaps, God’s design to showcase to president that this was how far the Bank had traveled with Ghana as a development partner.

The irony of it is that after being touted as a success story in Africa, Ghana currently struggles to provide sufficient and reliable energy for domestic consumption and industrial use, little wonder that Ghana’s industries even lacked the capacity to produce the jubilee clothe, according the Minister of Presidential Affairs.

But the darkness and its undertones did not scare the World Bank boss from pursuing his agenda. Paul Wolfowitz, according to the Ghana office of the Bank, was said to have been invited by the government of Ghana to participate in the country’s 50th Anniversary celebrations, a commemoration of Africa’s struggle against all traces of colonialism and imperialism. As it turned out, he had little to say about the anniversary celebrations apart from acknowledging that Ghana was the first country in the post war period to gain independence and that that alone makes Ghana a leader for the whole sub-continent.

Paul Wolfowitz first observation on arrival was about Ghana’s economy, which he saw as doing well in the last 10 years; a period he described as one of “good sound economic policy” making. “We would say that Ghana’s economic performance in the first years was disappointing and not what the people here wanted, but I am very pleased that in the last 10 years or so, Ghana has become one of the stronger performing African economies and that has come about through attention to human development and through attention to good, sound economic policy,” he told Ghana’s Finance and Economic Planning Minister, Mr. Baah-Wiredu, at the airport.

Ghana, he said, should continue to step up policy reforms and improve the business environment if she is to achieve the growth levels of the best performing economies in the world and create jobs for her teaming unemployed youth.

He insists on reforms or what he prefers to call “improved policy environment” as being what will take Ghana to economic success, not the type and volume of financial support the Bank can offer to the country that has been its member since September 1957.

“No amount of money by itself is going to work without continued effort to improve the policy environment,” he proffered in answer to a question from journalists as to why the Bank is reluctant in giving lump sums to countries like Ghana to invest in say energy infrastructure, the lack of which today, is crippling Ghanaian businesses.

Paul Wolfowitz’s answer however betrayed the Bank as an institution that lends to only those who toe its line of economic thinking, and not for the purposes of achieving a world free of poverty as its claims in its mission statement. But even, it has insisted providing loans on a piece-meal basis so as to keep countries like Ghana and others in the developing world at levels that fit well into the interest of the developed world.

From the Bank’s own data, Ghana has, to date, gained only $4.2 billion as credit since 1983 when she accepted and religiously implemented the Bank’s proposed Economic Reform Programme (ERP). The implementation of the ERPs, which saw thousands of workers in state enterprises losing their jobs, several state owned enterprises offloaded onto private hands and state withdrawal from delivering health care among others, however did not see Ghana coming out poverty as the Bank had predicted.

Today, the Bank itself acknowledges that gains from those policies, have been concentrated in the forest areas, where there is a concentration of cocoa, gold and timber production. And that there was the least poverty reduction in the savanna region, which relies more heavily on subsistence agriculture. As a result, poverty remains more widespread in the three chronically deprived regions (northern, Upper West and Upper East.) around 40% of poor people in Ghana live in the three sparsely populated northern regions.

The above facts however illustrate the point that western economic policies have failed to change the structure of the Ghanaian economy. It is still reliant on primary exports and has a weak manufacturing and industrial base.