Are Ghanaian Neo-Liberals Bankrupt Of Ideas?

I was astonished to read an article posted by Mr. Asare Otchere-Darko on the features web-page of Ghanaweb.com on Friday, 3rd April 2009, entitled: “PROVIDING HOMES FOR THE PEOPLE”.

It is instructive that in that article he quotes part of an interview conducted in June 1987, with Mrs. Thatcher, conducted by Frank Melville and Christopher Ogden, of The Times newspaper.

Asare Otchere-Darko’s fixation with leaders like Mrs. Thatcher, illustrates perfectly, the bankruptcy of thought of many to the right of the political spectrum, in Ghana.

The Thatcher (and Reagan) years are seen by even British (and U.S.) conservatives as the period when the seeds of today’s financial crisis were sown.

Sadly, Ghana’s stooges for neocolonialism, took the ethos that underpinned Thatcherism, unfathomable greed, to heart in a very big way – and it was the greedy ambitions of a powerful few during the tenure of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), which led to their regime eventually succeeding in bringing our country to its knees, in 2008.

Today, even little children in primary schools across our country know that by the end of their tenure, a nation that had been given the space to grow (thanks to “debt-relief”), was suffering from acute “debt-distress.”

The irony, is that although no one in the NPP joined those of us who fought for debt relief as far back as the 1990’s, it was their regime that benefitted from the opportunity it offered our nation's economy to start growing again, in a more sustainable fashion.

Unfortunately, they ended up piling up the same large external debt - interest payments on which had been squeezing the very lifeblood out of our nation, and crippling it, during much of the Rawlings era.

The sad truth is that those who said they were going to create a property-owning democracy in our country, only succeeded in creating a society whose most prominent feature, at the end of their tenure, was a nation dominated by a culture of dog-eat-dog selfishness.

 It spawned a culture of widespread dishonesty, and greed, throughout our country: causing much damage to the moral fibre of Ghanaian society.

We have thus ended up becoming a nation awash with conmen who appoint themselves “Bishops” – who never say a word about character-building but focus exclusively on the art and science of making money.

Mr. Asare Otchere-Darko bemoans the candour of the chairperson of his party’s manifesto committee: “Unhelpful remarks from the Manifesto Committee Chairman that it was not government’s job to provide homes for the masses…”

 Perhaps one should point it out to him that indeed his party did not come to power to provide houses for the masses (which is why some of them saw the “low-cost” housing scheme as a perfect opportunity to further diversify their investment portfolios – and send their personal net worth a tad higher up into the stratosphere).

As Ghanaians now know, far from turning our country into a property-owning democracy, they only succeeded in turning it into a kleptocracy dominated, in the main, by a small but powerful and ruthless Akan tribal-supremacist oligarchy.

Does he not realise that the petulance of Jake Obestebi-Lamptey, when he was insisting that yet further changes be made to his newly and expensively-renovated official residence, not too long after they first assumed power, neatly encapsulated his party’s real agenda: the empowerment of the ruling elite by their use of the Ghanaian nation-state’s considerable powers to enrich themselves – and use that wealth to try and dominate our country permanently?

That is why by the end of their tenure the president thought nothing of using (or as the cynics in our midst would say, abusing) the power given him by the constitution of the Republic of Ghana, to transfer the title of what was a state-owned property used as an official ministerial residence, to Jake Obestebi-Lamptey personally.

Obviously, “less government” can be pretty good for you – especially if you can benefit materially from it.

Surprising though it might be to the Asare Otchere-Darkos, and the “Washington-based” Baffuor Ennins of this world, the issue is not that anyone in Ghana doubts that wealth is an “enabler of everyone’s success” – the issue is what ends those who vie for political power in our country seek it for.

The issue is the nature of the society politicians seek to create in our nation. Do they, for example, seek power in order to use the power of the Ghanaian nation-state to enable us create an African equivalent of the egalitarian societies of Scandinavia in our country – for the benefit of all strata of the Ghanaian polity?

Or do they seek power to enable them revive the power of the progeny of the pre-colonial feudal ruling elites – and Balkanize our country in the process as they attempt to revive the power of the pre-colonial kingdoms, by stealth, and through the back door, as it were?

Some of us believe that a good example of the benign use of the power of the Ghanaian nation-state is to nationalize land currently held in trust by Chiefs on their people’s behalf – and redistribute it to small-holder tenant farmers.

That way, a significant majority of Ghana’s cocoa farmers will have sufficient land to derive yet more income from their labour. When that happens, situations such as that now prevailing in Akyem Juaso, where cocoa farmers are rushing to lease their farmland to a surface gold-mining company, as we speak, will come to an end.

Those cocoa farmers feel compelled to lease their land, because far from being wealthy, they are rather fed up with being so wretchedly poor. Their hope, in selling their farmland, is that in so doing, they too can have some real money in their pockets for a change.

The loquacious Asare Otchere-Darko quotes his Washington-based like-minded friend Baffour Ennin, thus: “A small minority within our academic clerisy is notorious for propounding unworkable and unsustainable political and economic models purportedly to advance and protect the interests of Ghana’s hoi polloi…”

Perhaps it ought to be pointed out to the Baffour Ennins, and the Asare Otchere-Darkos, that their use of the phrase “Ghana’s hoi polloi” to describe ordinary Ghanaians, is a Freudian slip that shows their contempt for ordinary people.

It is the same contempt that Dr. J. B. Danquah (after whom they have named their centre for blindly copying discarded right-wing ideas from the Anglo-Saxon world), who admired the elitist English philosopher, Edmund Burke, also had for ordinary Ghanaians.

As we all know, Danquah was an Akan tribal-supremacist, a quisling, and a stooge for Western imperialism and neocolonialism – who was on the pay-roll of the CIA: because he worked very hard to further their interests in our country.

One certainly hopes that the Danquah Institute was not set up to be a hotbed for the indoctrination of the next generation of quislings and stooges for neocolonialism in Nkrumah’s Ghana.

As to the charge that progressives are apparently impractical, well, perhaps they do not know it, but as far back as the 1990’s some of us were advocating for the debt relief that gave their regime the space to grow our economy – when they neither had the nous nor the imagination to do so.

Some of us have also been suggesting for years that personal income tax ought to be abolished in our country, and that we ought to set corporate tax at a maximum rate of 10 per cent – because we understand that lessening the tax-burden on companies and individuals serves as an incentive for the creation of wealth in nations.

There is nothing “unworkable and unsustainable” about that, is there, dear reader? And will it not achieve the same objective that those who floated the daft and dangerous idea of making Ghana an offshore banking centre had in mind?

Yet another radical wealth-creation idea from this particular progressive, is that rather than doling out zillions of taxpayers’ money to pamper our corrupt political elite, in, and out of office, we should think instead of getting the Ghanaian nation-state to ask the Bank of Ghana to create real wealth (like many capitalist nations have been busy doing lately!), by giving every adult farmer in rural Ghana GHc 20,000 as a bonus payment for feeding our nation over the years.

That will be their equivalent of the ex-gratia packages we pay to politicians for messing up our country. Surely, it is far better to distribute some of our future oil and natural gas revenues that way – than to allow it to end up in the offshore bank accounts of our kleptocratic elite?

The Left in Ghana simply wants to ensure that the greedy ambitions of a powerful few (to paraphrase the great Nkrumah) do not determine the destiny of our nation.

They want the resources of our country to be used to create Africa’s equivalent of the egalitarian societies of Scandinavia – so that the cheeky beneficiaries of inherited privilege will not have the effrontery to refer to ordinary people as “hoi polloi” and attempt to revive the power of the pre-colonial Akan feudal kingdoms by stealth, when they succeed in tricking their way to power in our country.

Finally, let us remind them that Nkrumah - who they accuse of “propounding unworkable and unsustainable political and economic models”- whom some of us are disciples of, always believed in a mixed economy – and they can read his letter of February 26th, 1965, to U.S. President Johnson, to see evidence of that (pages 22 and 23 of “The Great Deception” published by the Socialist Forum of Ghana).

One also hopes that it hasn’t escaped the Asare Otchere-Darkos, and the Washington-based Baffuor Ennins, that now that they have their backs to the wall, the wealthy capitalist nations of the West have not hesitated in using the power of the nation-state to save their own nations from collapsing, as market capitalism of the poorly-regulated kind, momentarily fails them.

The Ghanaian right must think more creatively if it wants to be successful in the long-term – not recycle “unworkable and unsustainable” right-wing ideas now abandoned in even the bastions of capitalism such as the U.S. and the UK.