by Akwasi Prempeh

Nana Akufo-Addo has been promising high and mighty if Ghanaians would elect him as the next president. His promises are too numerous to be listed here. One important promise of Nana is that he will continue with Kufuor’s deeds. What has been Kufuor’s deeds in the past eight years?

Let us start from the economic front. Kufuor took the Ghanaian economy that had gone through a string of structural adjustment programs to declare Ghana as highly indebted and poor country – HIPC. Let me at this point quote extensively from what Mr. Akoto Ampaw, a distinguished lawyer in the law firm of Nana Akufo-Addo wrote on the topic “Ghana and HIPC: What Should Be Done?” on March 2, 2001:

“The real issue however is that the problems of Ghana’s debt and economic crisis are not likely to be resolved with the framework of Ghana as the sole reference point. A West African and continental vision is the only solution. And the recent decision by African Foreign Ministers in Libya a few days ago to approach the daunting problems of our external debt from a collective standpoint may prove far more beneficial for a long term development of our continent, than HIPC. “The Kufuor government therefore has a choice to make: if it simply intends to survive as a government without any great ambitions of moving this country forward, then clearly, it has something to gain in joining HIPC, and adopting another IMF structural adjustment programme. Indeed, it would amount to cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face, to reject HIPC, while nevertheless pursuing structural adjustment and the conditionalities of the IMF. “If however it seeks to tackle the socio-economic problems of this country from the root, and move us forward as a proud and able people, then it ought to reject HIPC without a second thought. However if it were to do so, it ought to know, and every Ghanaian ought to know, that there will be some tough and difficult days ahead. Will the Kufour government be bold and visionary enough to take this path of struggle; or will it capitulate to the path of servitude and relative tranquility? And are our people, especially the vociferous middle class, ready to stand up to the demands of struggle?” Mr. Akoto Ampaw further stressed home the point that: “For Ghana to accept HIPC will close the door to creative policies and the possibility of change in economic policy. And the benefits are not that great. No doubt we shall enjoy some degree of debt relief and if we manage to meet all the conditionalities throughout the period, we shall have our total debt stock reduced by some percentage, anything between about 10% to 30%. If however Ghana's new government seeks a genuine fresh start for Ghana, which will move us forward as a proud and able people, then we ought to reject the path chosen for our nation by external creditors, whose interests do not coincide with those of the Ghanaian people.”

The fresh start Mr. Ampaw alluded to required that the following questions, among others, were to be answered as NPP and Ghana contemplated the HIPC decision: How do you transform an underdeveloped economy and society, highly dependent on a single crop (cocoa) with unstable international prices for the bulk of its export earnings? How do you transform an agricultural economy which spends nearly 80% of its export earnings to import oil and food? How do you transform and raise productivity in a low productivity small holder based agricultural sector? How do you industrialise a country with a small home market whose foreign trade partners were heavily locked into those of a few Western economies? How do you generate resources for a steady improvement in the living standards of a people whose expectations have been greatly fuelled by independence and the visionary pronouncements of their leader Kwame Nkrumah? Despite temporary respite from HIPC and rising cocoa prices on the world market, Ghana still faces serious debt crisis. The fragility of the situation facing the NPP administration was forcefully brought home by the energy and economic crisis of the last two years of the Kuffuor era. When oil prices on the international market rose to dizzying heights of $150.00 per barrel, the NPP started selling national assets – GT and recently, Valco even though there did not appear to be a buyer for Valco. Oh, then came the good news: Oil had been found in commercial quantities in Ghana’s territorial waters near Half Assini. Kuffuor and the NPP kleptocrats started gloating even though the oil found would not be drilled until 2010 or there about. With the falling prices of oil on the world market and current financial crises in the West, one wonders whether Tulow and its partners will be able to raise the financial capital to drill the oil found near Half Assini in the Western Region of Ghana. “Time will tell,” wrote Mr. Akoto Ampaw in 2001. How prophetic Mr. Ampaw turned out to be!

Sure Kufuor used the HIPC reprieve money to build a number of schools, some roads and public toilets and designated them as “HIPC benefits,” many of these projects were so vitiated and tainted with corruption that they were either abandoned for lack of funding (e.g., the Tema Community 4/7 Golden Jubilee Youth Training Centre, the starch factory at Bawjiase and PSI projects) or were hurriedly and shabbily built that they could not stand a brief rainstorm (e.g., Ajumako public toilet, about 300 meters from Hon. Edumadze’s mansion), or they never got built at all (e.g., the proposed Ampia-Ajumako gari factory for which some few bags of cement were provided by the District Assembly). Kufuor and the NPP government, in which Nana Akufo-Addo was a senior minister, gave us a re-denomination of the cedi - the “Kufuor dollar.” This re-denomination exercise was foisted on Ghana by the technocrats of the Bank of Ghana. It came without the relevant fiscal policies required to rein in the trade deficit that has been made worse by unbridled trade liberalization programs, and the annual government budget deficit that was being funded by external bilateral and multilateral institutions. The re-denomination exercise was carried out by a team of technocrats led by Mumuni Bawumia, the political novice who has been tapped as the Vice Presidential candidate running on the ticket of the NPP. Kuffuor promised us that the cedi would exchange one to one with the US dollar. The cedi is now exchanging - US$1.00 to 1.16 Ghana Cedi – that is, at 22.17% below what it was in relation with the US dollar at the beginning of year 2008, the highest rate of depreciation since December 2000. “Consequently,” according the President of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry,” importers are paying more for imports and domestic consumers are faced with higher price of imported goods as the Bank of Ghana has also increased the base rate from 12 per cent to 17 per cent and lending rates have gone up from 18 per cent to 27 per cent.”

The government has had to sell national assets such as the Ghana Telecom (GT) as a stop gap measure in the ever widening government budget deficit which is at the root of fast decline of the cedi vis a vis other currencies. If the NPP government cannot cut frivolous projects (e.g., presidential palace, purchase presidential jets, extravagant promotion of tourism, the hiring of the Whittaker Group for lobbying that was not cost effective, and profligate spending to celebrate Ghana@50 that Wereko-Brobbey refuses to be held accountable for) or raise taxes or grow the economy to broaden the tax base to balance the budget, what national assets remain to be sold next?

On the issue of the sale national assets like the GT, it is interesting to note that the celebrated economist - Mr Kwame Pianim in an interview with Daily Graphic stated that Ghana's economy needed an injection of $130 million to stay healthy and the sale of 70 per cent of GT shares to Vodafone could provide that critical support, strengthen the macro economy and control inflation. During the debate over the sale of GT it was also stated that without this sale, Ghana Telecom would be in critical condition and the workers jobs would be at risk, it is interesting that the running mate to Nana Akufo-Addo was part of the Board of Directors that oversaw the decline of Ghana Telecom to the sorry state that it had to be sold. Some people further claim that the legacy of Owusu-Adjepong's tenure as the Minister of Communications was what led to the poor performance of GT. While at the ministry, Owusu-Adjepong interfered in the deliberations of National Communications Authority (NCA) by imposing himself as Chairman of that regulatory body. Mr. Owusu-Adjepong would later admit that the Ministry lacked the expertise when dealing with telecommunication matters (Ghanaweb, Feb. 13, 2002). Yet experts abounded in the country, but NPP had tagged them all as NDC connected.

Lest we forget that President Kufuor undermined the legitimacy of the regulatory agency, NCA over the WESTEL debacle.

The WESTEL debacle all started when WESTEL failed to meet its contractual obligation of supplying 4,000 lines within five years. It could only deliver 2,000 lines and restricted its operations to Accra and Tema Metropolitan areas, where businesses are concentrated. The NCA responded by slapping a 70.5 million US dollar penalty on the company. In May 2002, at the celebration of the 34 th World Telecommunications Day in Accra, the acting director-general of NCA, J.R.K. Tannoh, announced that his office would resort to a court action to compel WESTEL to pay, insisting that: “We are mandated to instill discipline in the telecommunications sector to ensure that customers have value for money, and any operator who does not conform to the rules will have to be sanctioned.”

The US assistant secretary of commerce, William Henry Lash, III,vi sited Ghana ostensibly to hold trade talks with government officials and private sector operators. But he went on an Accra local FM station, rather undiplomatically, to lambaste the NPP government for its allegedly unfriendly attitude to foreign investors. Referring to the penalty on WESTEL, he accused the government of acting irrationally. Soon after the Lash attack, the president personally intervened to reduce the WESTEL penalty from 70.5 million US dollars to 28 million US dollars. Eventually, the WESTEL debacle was swept under the carpet when it was sold to a company now called ZAIN.

Even though President John Kufuor revealed that his government did not even know the names of the shareholders of WESTEL as the rules required, Mr. J. H. Mensah, the then Senior Minister and chairman of the Government Economic Management Team wanted GT given to his friends in the AT&T. “Mr. Mensah publicly expressed his wish to see AT&T become the strategic investor in a GT with a natural monopoly: “I have a friend who worked with the American AT&T for many years, he is a very senior manager. On a visit I talked to him about inviting foreign partners into telecom here …. we havecommunicated and he is coming back to see me very soon because they have seen new potential in the market, so you know the companies are all making calculations.”17 The minister’s “new potential in the market” refers to the termination of the GT agreement with G-Com (Telekom Malaysia). G-Com outbid AT&T in the initial privatization of GT five years earlier. What one quickly gathers from Mr. Mensah’s words is that telecom regulation is no longer the exclusive business of the NCA. Nor is the sector ministry solely responsible for it” (quoted from TELECOM REGULATION, THE POSTCOLONIAL STATE, AND BIG BUSINESS: THE GHANAIAN EXPERIENCE by Amin Alhassan, West Africa Review, Vol. 4(1), 2003, http://www.westafricareview.com/vol4.1/4.1war.htm).

If Nana promises to continue Kufuor’s economic policies of more borrowing and borrowing from 419 schemers who operate from salons and barber shops, then our “beggar nation” status will only get worse. The Akan say “Fem di fem tua nye asetena pa” – borrow to eat and borrow to pay is not a good way to make a living.

Let us now look at the issue of rule of law in the country. Armed robbery, vigilante justice, contract killing, blatant disregard for traffic rules and reckless driving, and drug trafficking – blatant acts of lawlessness - have become the order of the day. The drug menace has earned Ghana an unenviable name. The good old Gold Coast has now become internationally known as the “Coke Coast.” According to Nana, “Rule of law and the maintenance of law and order must prevail without fear or favour, irrespective of one’s social standing.” Ghanaweb News of 2007-02-15. Does Nana really believe in what he said? I ask this question because Nana as the Attorney General and Minister of Justice is believed to have de-confiscated the seized assets of his brother-in-law, Amankwaah, a known international drug trafficker. Nana returned the seized passport of Amankwaah. Amankwaah soon after was arrested and jailed in Brazil for drug trafficking. Nana is believed to have sponsored the “Amoateng Bill” so that Ghanaians jailed in other countries would be brought home to serve their remaining jail terms. The bill was named after Eric Amoateng, the jailed narcotic peddling person who was arrested in the US even as he was sitting NPP member of parliament.

Nana as the Attorney General and Minister of Justice ought to know why three narcotic peddling people like Dzorwulu NPP officers (Abenaa Foriwaa, Comfort Akua Amankwaa, and Ama Nyarkoa) - were released and freed when they were arrested at the Accra International Airport for carrying cocaine. As the chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Nana Akufo-Addo was at sleep on his watch when Bamba engaged in visa racket under the big nose of President Kufuor at the Castle.

Under Kufuor’s watch human rights violations did not seem to bother the NPP administration. What happened that Nana who protested against human rights violations during the Rawlings era said nothing and did nothing when Yaa Naa and forty of his elders were murdered in broad daylight? What did Nana do when Mobilla was murdered in police/military custody? As Minister for Foreign Affairs, what did Nana do when 44 Ghanaians were murdered in the Gambia? What has Nana done lately when his bodyguards and police pounced on a photo-journalist a Kumasi hotel last weekend? When is Nana going to ensure us that “rule of law and the maintenance of law and order must prevail without fear or favour,” that he is quoted to have said?

Kufuor promised us “zero tolerance for corruption” and Nana as the chief lw enforcement officer as the Attorney failed to keep the president’s feet to the fire. He failed to show the president the evidence he needed in order to act. What evidence did the president “sniff” from the air of financial malfeasance that blew from UDS that made his heart jump?

For 8 years the NPP administration ,in which Nana Akufo-Addo was a senior minister, promised Ghanaians affordable housing. During the Kufuor era, the price of a bag of cement sky-rocketed. At at a meeting with the Ghana real Estate Developers Association (reported on Ghanaweb on 03/03/2008), Nana said, among other things that, “The cost of construction materials, from cement and iron rods to furnishings, continues to make home-ownership almost exclusive to Ghanaians in the Diaspora and the very rich.” In the 8 years rule of the NPP, the high priests and proponents of “property-owning democracy,” ignored or failed to enforce the rule requiring that rent advance should not be more than six months. NPP has had 8 years to have made housing affordable so that people would not sleep in the streets, kiosks and containers. Nana promises to make housing affordable in his term of four years. Ha!

Nana Akufo Addo is reported to have said: "Education is the key to the development of this country. In developed countries like North Korea and Malaysia, illiteracy has been eliminated so education must be the priority of every government."

I will like to bring to Nana’s attention that during the eight years of NPP rule the JSS students who take the BECE have nearly 50% of them failing each year. What did NPP do to reduce the 50% failure rate? NPP added one more year to the SSS duration. Only about 20% of students who enter primary one make it to the SSS level. NPP has promoted education to the benefit of a very privileged few for the past eight years. For eight good years NPP has supervised the churning out of illiterates from the basic education system. The 50% of the students who fail the BECE are doomed for ever as they do not get the chance to re-sit the exam nor do they have the option of benefiting from good apprenticeship programmes.

There is a widening achievement gap between girls and boys despite the fact that NPP appointed a Minister for Girl Child Education in addition to a minister of state for Higher Education and minister of education. There is also widening achievement gap between rural and urban school students, not to mention the south-north disparity.

The very unnecessary school feeding programme has been riddled with corruption and misappropriation of funds. Perhaps President Kufuor has been out of the country to much to sniff the odorous air of misappropriation and financial malfeasance drifting the kitchen of school feeding programme. Nana, which of these promises are you going to keep in four years if you were to become the next president?

The Ghanaian electorate should weigh these issues carefully as they decide to vote for Nana to keep his empty promises or vote for Atta-Mills for real change.

Akwasi Prempeh may be reached at ohenenana.prempeh@gmail.com.