67 Years Later, Has Ghana Lost the Plot When It Comes to Development?
Where do we go from here as a country….
Kwame Nkrumah once said, “the black man is ready to manage his own affairs...”
This was said after Ghana had gained independence from Britain. Nkrumah hoped to build the country with Ghanaians controlling their own destiny.
Fast forward to 2024.
If we were to look at how far the country has come, can we really say that Ghana has done a good job on managing our own affairs? Or we are just putting up a charade and we actually don’t know what we’re doing?
Early Days
In some circles, there have been discussions that in the early days, countries like Ghana and Singapore were close in terms of economic development after gaining independence.
Ghana achieved independence from Britain in 1957. Five years later, Singapore achieved its independence in 1965.
Ghana, is fair to say, had a head start due its wealth of natural resources including Gold and Cocoa, which it could exploit to further its economic development.
Singapore, on the other hand, had lack of major resources and was mostly considered a country whose major resources were “fish”.
But fast forward and Singapore has achieved a lot more in terms of economic development. If we’re using GDP per capita data as a measuring stick, Singapore has done way more in terms of development compared to Ghana and it's not even close.
So what happened exactly? How are we as a country so bad in terms of development and management in the modern era especially considering we have now oil and other major resources?
Is there a conspiracy against Ghana? Or we just bad managers of our own destiny?
Politics for Dummies
If you know Ghana’s history, you know that Nkrumah was effectively overthrown in a coup. Ghana finally became a democracy country when it had its first general election in 1992.
Over the years, elections have been peaceful which has help Ghana serve as a beacon of hope, especially when compared to other African countries.
But internally, Ghanaian Politics seems to be at its worst.
Ghana is effectively run by two major parties:
- The National Democratic Party
- The National Patriotic Party
It’s basically a duopoly, with both parties swapping political power every eight years. It doesn’t look like there’s going to be a change in the years to come.
On 7th December 2024, Ghana will hold its national presidential elections and the baton will either be passed to either the current Vice President or the former President John Mahama of the NDC party who lost in the last two previous general elections.
In many ways, there will no actually “change”.
Any talks of a third party should be quashed. Since 1992, there have been 13 third political forces and NONE of them have been able to break 200,000 electoral votes in the presidential race.
Early polls show that John Mahama is the more likely candidate to win the 2024 General Elections.
As far as meaningful change, there really isn’t much to expect once he steps in power given the current economic conditions and the state of government agencies.
So aside from politics, what do we have left?
What Happened to Ghana Sports?
Ghanaian football used to be a powerhouse. Ghana has won the African Cup of Nations four times in 1963, 1965, 1978 and 1982.
In 2005, Ghana finally qualified for the World Cup and the team showed that we belonged amongst the best.
In 2010, Ghana was highly ranked in the world of football, achieving a FIFA Football ranking of 14th. Yes, Ghana was once the 14th best football team in the world.
Fast forward and the word “embarrassment” doesn’t do enough justice to what has become of Ghanaian football.
Ghana has been on a downward trajectory which has been marred by controversy, scandals and outright bad performances.
As of this writing, Ghana is ranked 67th in the world. We just had our worst performance at the AFCON tournament where the national team didn’t win a single game.
But football was not only our national pride. We used to be a great boxing country. Azuma Nelson, also known as “The Professor” was our national flagbearer when it came to boxing. He held the WBC featherweight title from 1984 to 1987 and the WBC super-featherweight title twice between 1988 and 1997. He is considered to be one of African’s best boxers of all time.
Unfortunately, Ghana’s best boxing days appears to be in its past.
But there has been some shine. The last highlight Ghana had in boxing was at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, where Samuel Takyi secured a bronze in the men’s featherweight division. He was the first Ghanaian to win a boxing medal since 1971.
Unfortunately, that’s the only high mark in boxing.
No Ghanaian boxer will be at the 2024 Paris Olympic games because none failed to qualify.
You Can’t Entrepreneur Your Way Out Of “Chaos”
Ghana is basically a “dollar” economy. It’s not strange to see billboards in the city advertising apartments for rent with the quotes being in USD.
Most imports which come into the country are priced in USD. This in turn makes the local currency, the Cedi, weak AF. (AF = as fuck)
The Dollar to GHC exchange rate has skyrocketed over the last few years, reaching a high during 2022.
As of the time of this writing, the USD to GHC rate is $1 = 12.7 GHC
This means that if a something was priced at $10, you are expected to pay 12x when paying in the local currency.
It also doesn’t help that we also largely import most of our goods and products into the country.
Entrepreneurs are not having a great time. After COVID, Ghana’s economy took another hit due to the Ukraine-Russia war which shot up prices with inflation reaching a high of over 50%.
Some businesses have shut down and others are currently reeling.
It doesn’t help that the Government keeps trying to add new taxes to raise more revenue for its depleted reserves.
This is what consumers and importers have to deal with when it comes to taxes:
Taxes:
- (Import) Customs Tariffs and Levies: 0% to 35%
- Value Added Tax (VAT): 15%
- National Health Insurance Levy: 2.5%
- Ghana Education Trust Fund: 2.5%
- COVID Levy: 1%
- Tourism Levy: 1%
- (Import) Import Excise Duty: Varies
- (Import) African Union Levy: 0.2%
- (Import) ECOWAS Levy: 0.5%
- (Import) Processing Fee: 2%
- (Import) Special Import Levy: 2%
- Electronic Levy (e-Levy): 1%
Taxes can add up quickly, cutting into business budgets and affecting operations.
Even production of our natural resources has not been great. Cocoa, which used to be our pride and joy is in trouble.
Ghana lost its crown as the leader of cocoa to Cote D’Ivoire some years back. Currently, it’s also losing ground to another country: Indonesia.
I’m not the best at deducing the cocoa market but many have said that the entity which manages cocoa production, COCOBOD, is basically a cacophony of mismanagement.With high taxes, the increasing cost of doing business in Ghana, it’s hard to scale your business.
So how can you grow your business when the economic environment walls are closing in on you?
Technology Is Not a Magic Bullet
Digitisation appears to be a major buzzword especially when it comes to the current administration. Digitisation can definitely affect efficiency and improve operations for the better.
But in order for everything to work, the environment has to be very conductive.
The Ghana Government has dabbled in the use of technology at some of its agencies. Overall, the results are mixed.
The Passport office underwent a significant change in 2017 when it started online applications. Efficiency was improved and the process became more structured.
Unfortunately, the positivity has been marred by a backlog of passports due to printing issues and internal corruption with certain individuals withholding customers passports until they are directly compensated.
Ghana has trying to digitise other aspects including online services. The World Bank has been helping with this by trying to digitise business administration and registration.
Again, the goals have been mixed.
The shining light so far has been the Government’s new Ghana.Gov website. A portal similar to the UK’s government portal, it allows citizens to log in and access certain services. It’s a major step up from the previous iteration.
The project has so far been successful due to the collaboration by noted private sector players including Hubtel, expressPay and IT Consortium.
This could be the model future administrations could use for future tech projects, bringing together experienced local players to enhance government services with technology.
As much as technology can be a great player, administrations must be mindful that it is not a magic bullet that kills all their problems. It’s necessary to keep training internal staff, continuous auditing of the platforms to detect anomalies (corruption) and to improve the system over time.
The Local Level
When it comes to the more “local” level, there isn’t much home to write about.
Due to the nature of administration changes, some projects are either abandoned or cancelled as a result of new political figures who oversee certain projects.
In the case of public transportation, a number of projects haven’t really lived up to expectation, which has led to stalled operations and cancellation of others.
What Now?
Honestly, there are so many sectors I could look at and tackle from the energy sector to food production and the numbers and data wouldn’t be too great.
There needs to be a change. A BIG change. Obviously, the data shows that things are not working. Politicians love to give you all the macroeconomic numbers including GDP growth to show that things are working but, on the ground, things are stale.
If things were going well, Ghana wouldn’t have gone to the IMF on multiple occasions with the latest IMF agreement reaching a high of $3 billion(!).
PS: Ghana is doing terrible work in politics and female inclusiveness.
I don’t want to be “Chicken Little” and say that the sky is falling but there are really dark clouds in Ghana.
Has progress been made?
Of course. Life expectancy has increased. Multinational companies are setting up offices and hiring local workers. Thanks to innovations like mobile money, businesses in the informal economy have better means to accept payments and make transfers.
But if we go back to the Singapore example, we should be far ahead compared to where we are now.
We have the potential, but that potential is not being exploited enough.
If you observe social media, where most of Ghanaian youth tend to go to vent, you can see the frustration and dread. Many want to leave the country to find better opportunities.
At this point, answers are hard to find.
Ghana can be better. We’re just holding ourselves back.
Joseph-Albert Kuuire is a Product Designer and User Researcher based in Accra, Ghana. He is also the founder of Techlabari.com
You can find more information on his personal website at josephkuuire.webflow.io.
