How the NPP government has assessed itself to be a failure

Finally, Ghana has entered into a new and direly needed medium term programme under the supervision of the International Monetary Fund. This three year Extended Credit Facility, which the incumbent President Nana Akufo Addo administration has grandiosely dubbed the Post COVID Programme for Economic Growth (PC- PEG)requires by far the biggest quantum of financial support from the Fund than all of Ghana’s 17 prior formal programmes with it; it is instructive that the immediate past programme for which the incumbent government intensely maligned the then President John Mahama administration only required US$1 billion in financial support, just one third of the US$3 billion that Ghana is now taking.

This is basically because the IMF itself realizes that Ghana’s current economic challenges are at least three times as deep as the ones that confronted it back in 2015. However in typical fashion the incumbent New Patriotic Party government ascribes the threefold increase in financial support secured from the Fund to its superior economic management capacity and confidence that this engenders in financial counterparties. In effect, this government asserts that Ghana’s current need for three times what it needed in 2015 to better economic management now, than then.

Instructively it is this same incongruous propaganda driven thinking that has led Ghana into its ongoing dire economic predicament in the first place. The very same NPP politicians who, when in opposition accused the then incumbent Mahama administration of borrowing too much, reinvented public debt management strategy upon their assumption of office to create a direct correlation between the quantum borrowed and the management capacity of the borrowing government.

In effect the Akufo-Addo administration resorted to applauding itself – and demanding applause from everyone else – for its ability to convince creditors to lend the country far more than what its predecessors had prudently limited themselves too.

Little wonder then that having criticized the Mahama administration for taking US$1 billion off the Eurobond market each year between 2013 and 2016, the Akufo-Addo administration resorted to taking US$3 billion a year when it came into office, claiming this was because the international investment community had great trust in its economic management capacities.

Is it surprising that having taken three times as much annually off the Eurobond market than its predecessors did, the incumbent government now needs three times as much from the IMF to fill up the gaping hole it put the country in?

Indeed, this has nothing to do with investor confidence in government’s economic management capacities – after all foreign investors have taken a net amount out of Ghana’s economy of some three billion over the past 18 months – but everything to do with the size of the economic problem the Akufo-Addo administration has created.

To be sure the signs were there right from the start of this government’s tenure in office; in April 2017, barely 100 days after assuming power, Finance Minister Ken Ofori Atta demanded praise for issuing the cedi equivalent of US$2.25 billion in medium term public debt securities, by far the largest single such cedi denominated debt issuance in Ghana’s history on the capital market.

Beyond the sheer quantum of debt issued, it is instructive that in all its official statements on the controversy that erupted over government’s dubious procedure for issuing the debt, it unfailingly stated the amount taken in US dollars, the currency in which the payments for the debt securities were made rather than in cedis, the currency in which the investments were actually denominated.

This was an early sign of this government’s obsession with recklessly borrowing foreign exchange to temporarily stabilize the exchange rate in order to score political points without any consideration for the bill which Ghanaians would eventually have to pay – and which they are indeed now paying.

Finance Minister Ken Ofori Atta recently held a press briefing at which he tried to convince the media to back the government as it supposedly tries to undo the damage it has imposed on Ghana since assuming office. Part of his presentation included recent economic statistics which he claims evidences the fact that the economy is now on the right trajectory.

However, the facts cannot be disputed that none of Ghana’s key performance indicators are anywhere near where they were at the time the incumbent NPP government took office and at which time it claimed those indicators were unacceptably poor.

Indeed, the same government, having used quick fixes such as huge foreign borrowing to temporarily stabilize the cedi exchange rate, claimed clear superiority over the NDC government that had preceded it.

So how can it still claim superiority when all the key performance indicators are worse than they were when it assumed office? Simply put, the incumbent government is found guilty of extremely poor economic management by its own assessment criteria which it used to judge the Mahama administration.

Let us start with inflation, arguably the most key performance indicator for the average person on the street. The Akufo-Addo administration inherited a consumer inflation rate of 15.8% and over the next couple of years brought it down to under 10% (an achievement largely resulting from a rebasing of the computations for determining inflation and a refusal to adopt standard practice of running the results of the old computations alongside the new ones).

At the time the incumbent government claimed this feat as incontrovertible evidence of its superior economic management. So how can it still claim superiority when inflation has peaked at well over 50% on its watch and is currently at 42% and is not falling – the latest figure, for May, is higher than that for April.

Related to this is the level of interest rates which is actually the cost of money. During the run up to the 2016 general elections the Bank of Ghana’s benchmark Monetary Policy Rate was a relatively high 26%, and this attracted intense criticism from the NPP then in opposition, even though it had begun falling at that time.

The incumbent government over its first four years in office trumpeted the reduction in the MPR to a low of 13.5% as proof of its superior economic management. So how can it still claim economic management superiority when, on its watch, the MPR has risen to a historical high of 29.5% over the past year and a half? Like with inflation, the NPP’s own criteria for assessing economic management quality finds it guilty of failure.

Then comes the issue of the size of the public debt and the fiscal deficit that drives it. Ghana’s total debt stock has shot up to GHc450 billion in 2022 from GHc120 billion in 2017 according to Ministry of Finance data. These figures exclude certain aspects of Ghana’s energy sector debt and financial sector reform debt which government falsely claims are not part of the public debt even though government has to continue paying for it.

But the real, obvious question is how the NPP government that had warned Ghanaians that its NDC predecessors had borrowed too much for Ghana’s good has gone in to increase the public debt four times over during the past six and a half years.

Little wonder that Ghana is in a debt crisis that has forced government into debt restructuring which in effect has prevented investors who lent their savings to government from being paid back as and when due, an unprecedented event in post economically liberalized Ghana.

The biggest elephant in the room though has to be the cedi /dollar exchange rate. Between 2013 and 2016 the cedi depreciated from 3.5 to about 5.7 to the dollar, with the NPP intensely criticizing the Mahama administration for allowing this to happen on its watch.

Indeed, during its first four years in office the NPP government claimed relative exchange stability as more evidence of its economic management expertise, never failing to compare its record against that of the Mahama administration in this regard.

Somehow though, the well over 100% depreciation of the cedi over the past 18 months, during which time the amount of cedis required to buy one dollar has risen from 6 to 13, is not seen by the incumbent administration as a failing; rather its improvement from a record of GHc15 to one dollar is supposed to be hailed as an outstanding feat of economic management.

All of this is simply absurd. The supposed failings of the NDC government under Mahama have become successes under the stewardship of the NPP’s Akufo Addo administration, simply because over the past couple of months there have been improvements from the troughs to which Ghana’s key economic performance indicators fell over the past year.

This is akin to a football team demanding to be applauded because after conceding five goals in the first half of a football match they only conceded three goals in the second half.

Of course, the incumbent administration continues to blame COVID 19 and more recently, the Russia Ukraine war for all these setbacks. While this is not true, Ghanaians bigger concern is that they voted the incumbent government into power to solve the challenges it had identified with the Mahama administration not to dream up excuses why their living standards have worsened dramatically along with the fortunes of the country’s economy as a whole.

Enough of the excuses. The NPP, when in opposition, found fault with Ghana’s economic trajectory under the Mahama administration and demanded applause when it reversed that trajectory upon first assuming power. Now that Ghana’s economic trajectory has gone into rapid reverse there can be no excuses anymore.

The Akufo Addo administration’s economic management is found to be a failure using the very assessment measures it used itself to judge not just the Mahama administration but its own initial performance.

No excuses can change that simple, basic fact.