Ato Forson, you can’t eat numbers

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

There are at least two Deputy Finance Ministers in the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), and so I had to do a double take to ensure that I was responding to the rejoinder of the right Finance Ministry second-bananas. According to Mr. Cassiel Ato Baah Forson, numbers do not lie.

Well, the truth of the matter is that “numbers actually do lie” because the credibility of the numbers cruncher depends squarely on the caliber of the concerned or subject number cruncher, as amply demonstrated in the context of the practical realities of the country’s economic development.

And in terms of the practical realities of the Ground Zero of Ghanaian politics, I have yet to come across any respectable Ghanaian economist who ranks any of the three Mahama cabinet appointees in the Finance Ministry in the same class of professional caliber and proven performance as Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the former Deputy-Governor of the country’s Treasury Department, the Bank of Ghana, and the three-time Vice-Presidential candidate of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).

In the wake of his much-ballyhooed lecture presentation on the state of the Ghanaian economy at the National Theater (the original venue for the lecture had reportedly been quashed by assigns of President John Dramani Mahama), the government’s number-crunchers at the Finance Ministry have gone into a dramatic defensive overdrive, perhaps in hopes of poking practically non-existent holes into the lecture presentation of Nana Akufo-Addo’s running-mate’s fairly exquisite analysis of the apocalyptically dismal state of the nation’s economy since 2000, with particular reference to the comparative performance between the government of the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party, on the one hand, and the 7-plus-year tenure of, first, the Mills-Mahama government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and, presently, the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur regime of the same NDC.

In the main, Dr. Bawumia’s argument is that the country’s economy under the Kufuor government performed over and above the levels of both above-referenced NDC governments during the period under discussion because although in terms of average performance, as statistically demonstrated, the two National Democratic Congress’ governments performed just a little better than their New Patriotic Party predecessor by a little over one-half of one-percent, or 6-percent, the complete absence of cash in-flow from oil production under President Kufuor’s tenure, clearly indicates the fact that the NPP government had remarkably far less financial resources to help turn the country’s economy around from the Stygian mess bequeathed it by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, the founding-father of the National Democratic Congress, who ruled the country from December 31, 1981 to 2000.

Alhaji Bawumia is also quick to point out that it was President Kufuor who auspiciously laid the impressive groundwork for the process of oil production in the country. The average annual growth of Ghana under the Kufuor government had also remarkably shot up from Chairman Rawlings’ unarguably dismal legacy of 3.7-percent to just over 9-percent.

To the foregoing effect, Dr. Bawumia observes: “After declining to 4.8% in 2009 [when the Kufuor-led NPP left the national political scene], real GDP growth increased to 7.7% [about the beginning period of commercial oil production] in 2010 and 14% in 2011 following the outset of full oil production.”

The Oxbridge- and Simon Fraser-educated world-class economist continues with his observation as follows: “Since 2011, however, real GDP growth has declined steadily and drastically to 3.9% in 2015, to basically the growth rate that Ghana attained in the year 2000.” What is significant to further observe here, Dr. Bawumia implicitly asserts, is the patently depressing common thread of gross managerial incompetence that has perennially characterized the performance of successive NDC governments, irrespective of leadership.

What the foregoing simply translates into is that the National Democratic Congress’ institutional juggernaut may be chock-full of pathologically corrupt and/or incompetent leaders or, worse still, the faux-socialist political party may be foolhardily in dogged pursuit of an ideology and/or development agenda that is simply not compatible with both the economic and political culture of the country.

What also makes Alhaji Bawumia’s quite poignant analysis and objective assessment of the ruling party’s performance one which the average Ghanaian ought to take seriously, in the lead-up to the 2016 general election, is the fact that the fruits of the erratic economic performance of the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur regime has not been stable and evenly spread, thus the acute hardship that most middle- and working-class Ghanaians are presently experiencing and have been enduring over the course of the past 7 years and counting.

We shall, of course, be exploring other aspects of this seismically insightful Bawumia lecture in the coming days. But we also significantly need to highlight the decidedly petty quibbles of Mr. Ato Forson, the Mahama Deputy Finance Minister, with the numbers meticulously crunched out by the New Patriotic Party’s Vice-Presidential Candidate.

According to Mr. Forson, Ghana’s fiscal deficit was 11.5% in 2012, and not the 12.2% stated by Dr. Bawumia. Then also, the Finance Ministry’s second-bananas claims that the country’s fiscal deficit in 2013 was 10.2%, and not the 11.7% trotted out by the Central University Distinguished Visiting Professor.

At the end of the day, even as then-Candidate Agyekum-Kufuor told Ghanaian voters, the best and most accurate measurement of the economic performance of the National Democratic Congress is by gauging the amount of money in the wallet of the average Ghanaian worker. As well, the quantity and nutritional content of the food on the kitchen or dining table of the average Ghanaian civil servant.