A letter from Ghana to IMF

Dear Madam IMF,

I am nowhere close to the seat of government and will not have any chance to meet you in the discussions that will lead to your 18th bailout program for our country.

I am therefore using this letter to sound you up on areas of interest which if tackled properly, will make your 18th attempt

Read full articledeliver far more than what the previous 17 were able to do.

The first area I would like your program to focus on is the presidency. The president has shown that he knows what to do. He just needs help how to do it.
Many Ghanaians are still looking up to him to fulfil the vow he made in January 2017 to protect the public purse.

Ironically, he also made other vows and has also acquired tastes that are not necessarily in alignment with protecting the public purse. The one thing that we therefore expect from you is to come with conditions that keep the presidency on the tight and narrow path that leads to the one destination that protects the public purse.

This you can do by imposing controls that are targeted at circumscribing the wide latitude which our constitution gives the presidency in the use of the country’s resources.

This latitude is our bane which parliament has over the years proven toothless in dealing with. The Fund must necessarily develop a public purse protection litmus test which all public expenditures must pass before they see the light of day. Your program will succeed if it does nothing else other than cultivating a new culture of thriftiness at the Jubilee House.

If you have to do anything else, then it should be taking a pragmatic look at the Free SHS program. Many Ghanaians don’t believe that we need a wholesale Free SHS program in order to ensure that every child who qualifies for SHS goes to school.

I don’t know your definition for witchcraft but you will scratch your head when you see a poverty stricken country paying school fees on behalf of rich parents. Your 18th foray into Ghana will mean nothing if it doesn’t ensure that only the poor benefit from a reviewed Free SHS program.

Only students who enter SHS from public Junior High Schools (JHS) popularly known as “syto” should have their fees borne by the state. It will be a great disappointment if you leave the free SHS policy it in its current populist form.

It is not obvious at first glance how a poorly funded Free SHS program unwittingly brings the rich down to the level of the poor. It does so by bringing the school system onto its knees to deliver inferior education to both the rich and poor as a result of inadequate funding.

However, when the rich pay for their wards and government pays only for the poor, the educational system will end up being better funded. This will translate into higher standards that benefit both the rich and the poor and in so doing, help to lift the poor to the level of the rich. Those who can afford must pay!

If you really want your support to deliver the country from its current economic crisis, then the other area you must not miss is the government’s Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) program.

The country has clear absolute and comparative advantages in Agriculture which your program must help us exploit to the full.

The savings from a restructured Free SHS can be used to subsidize the Agricultural value chain. This will not be enough though.

Although Balance of Payment support is your traditional scope, we will appreciate it if you will consider breaking tradition to extend your financial intervention to touch the country’s Agriculture.

In other words, give us money specifically to fund Agriculture. If you cannot get it for us yourselves, then help us to get it from those who trust you. Our Central Bank has also recently been declaring huge profits.

Profitability is not what we expect from the Central Bank. Get them to lead our investment drive in Agriculture instead of untargeted deficit financing of government profligacy. These interventions will deliver levels of success that your programs are not known for.

This is not all Miss IMF. Have you heard of NABCO? It is the acronym for Nation Builders Corps, a government youth employment program which nobody knows what they have built so far.

You can let us create value from NABCO by getting it redesigned into a two-module program that provides entrepreneurial support for the youth in the areas of Agriculture and ICT.

These are two low hanging fruits that will no doubt have desirable catalytic effects on the Ghanaian economy. The current design of the NABCO makes it a disguised unemployment benefit scheme which is unfortunately limited to a few.

Let NABCO be made a bedfellow of a well-funded PFJ that is supported by a transparent and competitive selection of beneficiaries, and it will no doubt become a game changer.

We have other suggestions but my letter is becoming too long. We can however not leave without touching on the Finance Ministry’s lamentations about the country’s dubious reputation of having the lowest tax-revenue to GDP ratio in West Africa. All the lamentations we have heard so far have been about the numerator of this ratio.

It will be good for the Fund to establish if a bloated denominator is not contributing to the low ratio.

After the denominator is validated, the Fund should insist on sending selected senior GRA officials on attachment to the Revenue Agencies of Togo, Benin, Liberia, Nigeria, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire which are reported to be running better ratios than us.

Let our president seek exemption for the attachment from the coup related sanctions on Mali, Guinea and Burkina. We need to learn from these countries how they are able to generate the higher ratios without imposing such a crippling tax as e-levy on their citizens.

Why do we need an e-levy to get to where others managed to reach without such a tax? We have the men but it looks like our neighbors have the women! Let us learn from them!

I think it is also just fair for me to make some clarifications at this point to disabuse your minds of any misconceptions you may have. It may be true that our economy has run into a more perilous state than it was when we last came to you in 2015. It is however important to put it on record that we do have the men.

We came to you the last time with men and women whose names you cannot remember. Trust me, we are now coming with men whose pedigree in economic management can never be lost on you.

All you will need is just to hear the sound bites of our Vice President, who is the leader of our Economic Management Team, and you will see what a solid team we have!

We also need to put one important thing in context. That we are the only West African country seeking your help at this time is nothing more than a testament of our nature as trailblazers. Remember that we were the first to gain independence in Sub-Saharan Africa.

We were also the first country to win the African Cup of Nations four times, winning the fourth and last one forty years ago in 1982. What is more, I am sure you have not forgotten how our president made the international headlines with sound bites from his COVID-19 lock down speech in 2020.

No other African leader was as globally acknowledged as he was. It is thus no surprise that we are once again the first in the sub-region to be coming to the IMF to seek relief from the ravages of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war.

We wish you a successful program as we hope that Ghana will become the first country to graduate from an IMF bailout program never to return again. It will be a first we shall all be proud of as it may be a first for the IMF too. But Remember, we have the men!

Sincerely yours