On February 7 of this year, the flag bearer of the NPP, Dr. Mahmoudu Bawumia, presented what he called his presidential vision to Ghanaians through a lecture. For him, this lecture provided a vision and reasons for Ghanaians to elect him as the President of Ghana. As usual, much press time has been spent discussing it.
After listening to him and the discussions that inundated the media, we believe we need to offer a response to expose the emptiness and foggy nature of his vision, which shows his unpreparedness to occupy the highest office in our land.
As expected of him, Dr. Bawumia, in that poorly prepared and presented speech, did what he is known to do best: misleading and insulting the intelligence of well-meaning citizens as well as corrupting the minds of unsuspecting individuals by spewing a barrage of carefully structured lies and nonsense.
Dr. Bawumia’s approach connotes a sad situation for the Republic of Ghana, the enlightened country of the black star, Pan-Africanism, and an able African nation.
Instead of a vision, Dr. Bawumia gave us a shop list of good-intentioned promises, fickle imaginations of a “Kwaku Ananse story of a nation wanted to build,” and a superb cacophonic chord of “I can do it if I was not a trotror bookman or a mate but a driver with specialization in trial an error.”
Incredible! Dr Bawumia has learned nothing about public administration, neither in wealth creation nor nation-building. Running the excellent Republic of Ghana and overseeing a lot of respectable Ghanaian citizens require serious minds. Dr Bawumia does not possess this virtue.
Many gave Dr. Bawumia the benefit of the doubt despite being a congenital and internationally known manipulator of truth. The extent we expected that since he is now a flag bearer of a major party, he would bring some honor and gravitas to the office he currently occupies by admitting to the abysmal performance of his government, which brought excruciating hardship to Ghanaians.
We also thought he would use the opportunity and the platform offered by the UPSA to ask Ghanaians for forgiveness for the mess he partnered with Ken Ofori Atta and his sleepy master to cause. Given the magnitude of the economic mess and the crimes he and the master/ driver perpetrated against Ghanaians, it will forever be difficult for him to sell any newly manufactured nonsense and ruse to our beloved countrymen and women.
Today’s Ghana has a gloomy macroeconomic profile. The fiscal deficit has widened to 9.3% of GDP due to higher spending, principally on wages, and operational budgets, including the Office of the President. Public debt hit 93.5% of GDP, up drastically from 82% in 2021, driven by primary fiscal deficits and exchange rates. The World Bank (2022) report on the economy posits that Ghana has entered a full-blown macroeconomic crisis with ramifications of poverty and hardships for citizens. This reminds me of Dr. Bawumia’s antidote to the “exposure of the fundamentals of the economy” syndrome.
Therefore, at a minimum, the bold vision we expected is the following, inter alia: an overall solution for “fixing the mess Dr. Bawumia has helped to create. This includes providing solutions for
- building a country capable of feeding itself by limiting the importation of over 90% of all its citizens eat,
- a country where its teeming youth (including adolescents and young girls) has secured jobs or can create ones for themselves,
- a country where corruption is nipped in the bud, and where all principal actors of the penal chain are independent of the ‘Almighty’ Jubilee House,
- a country where citizens can create wealth to meet their needs and aspirations
- a country aptly positioned to take advantage of the fourth industrial revolution in the global digital economy with tangible infrastructure that is capable of spurring patents development, R&D, new solutions etc.
- We did not hear any vision structured around foresight and well-thought-through policies that can bring about transformational change in the socio-economic strata of the Ghanaian Republic. Instead, we are told again that Ghana will build sky trains from South Africa and electric buses from Kwasiadwaso with no charging stations. Incroyable!!! This is why the visionary John Mahama sought to do one thing: “reset the country back to its glorious path.”
Thus, even as inevitable defeat awaits him in this year’s polls, he had no shame in providing a blueprint not guided by a definitive vision as his opponent, President John Mahama, has done to save his intellectual prowess as an economist.
While some of the proposals in the blueprint are merely rebranded plagiarized material of President John Mahama, the others lack coherence, focus, and depth to qualify as justifiers for a presidential run.
For Ghanaians to take the Vice President seriously, he needs to redo his homework well and develop a real vision to inspire a policy direction to get Ghana out of its current economic predicament. One of his proposals is to cut and abolish some taxes.
We found this proposal hypocritical because the NDC vehemently opposed most of the 50 taxes imposed by his government. Still, Dr. Bawumia’s Economic Management Team (EMT) advised the government to ignore all calls to subscribe to basic economic logic. Today, he denies this fact.
Bawumia, who was presented to Ghanaians as an economic management supremo, knew that these new nuisance taxes would suffocate the private sector and cause hardship for the already suffering Ghanaians. Yet he chose that path to achieve parochial goals.
Strangely, while the introduction of e-levy was strongly advocated by his government, road tolls, which are one of the benign ways of effective revenue mobilization to achieve fiscal consolidation, were scrapped unceremoniously.
Thank God President Mahama, who is the next president, has already proposed to cut or scrap these nuisance taxes; Bawumia has no shame in plagiarizing the idea. He also proposed the establishment of a mineral development bank.
Meanwhile, under his leadership of the economic management team, a bevy of banks have been closed, and those that survived the hostile closure are struggling to meet basic capital reserve requirements due to his government’s imprudent and draconian policies.
The bank closures in the name of needless banking sector clean-up rendered a lot of Ghanaians, especially the youth, jobless. Currently, many private banks play the role he used to justify the creation of a mineral development bank. Wouldn’t that bank then reduce the competitive advantages of our already struggling banks?
Therefore, we think it is illogical for Dr. Bawumia to propose setting up a bank when his reckless economic management led to creating a hostile business environment for banks to operate. At the time, he was reading what he called a vision: government-owned banks, including the National Investment Bank, Agricultural Development Bank, and even the Bank of Ghana, are gasping for solvency after recording huge losses.
The excessive haircuts to qualify for IMF’s program have eroded the equity position of most local banks, which can now not support the private sector. The excessive domestic borrowing by his government because of the closure of external borrowing doors has kept interest rates high and diminished private sector access to finance.
Dr. Bawumia also proposed reducing the size of the government by appointing only 50 ministers. This proposal stunned us because, for seven years, where was he looking when his government dished out ministerial and public sector positions to party cronies and family members like Candy? Where was he when the public sector, including his own office, became over-bloated? As he now pleads innocent to the responsibility of making or participating in making decisions that mess up our economy, can he explain what the large “technical staff” is doing in his office? Is he not crowding fiscal space with these appoints against IMF’s advice to pursue fiscal consolidation?
He also proposed the amendment and enhancement of the Financial Responsibility Act to reduce expenditure projection in budgets. Why do we have to wait for him to do this when he can or push for this amendment as the sitting Vice President?
He proposed constitutional amendments to scrap exgratia and deepen decentralization.
Ironically, his government truncated President Mills’s and President Mahama’s efforts to do the same. He proposed scrapping e-levy, introducing flat taxes on spare parts, introducing electronic GRA audits, and introducing a private sector tax regime. Why can’t he push for his driver as a mate to carry out these proposals? If he cannot get these done, what role has he played in government for the last seven years? Or because he has become a flag bearer, he has surrendered his responsibilities and roles to his master, who recently argued that he is not a lame-duck president?
We don’t know the mood of the Vice President when he conceived his “vision “and proposals. But they look mundane and lack the weight and depth to be counted as a Presidential agenda. Current public officers and departments can implement some of them as innovations under a visionary president to build the Ghana we want.
The Vice President, who has been the braggart and lecturer-in-chief of the current friends and family government, has already bragged about the accomplishment of most of his proposals.
For example, he already claimed that his government has empowered the private sector, digitalized everything, built 111 hospitals, introduced STEM schools, constructed roads, and developed other infrastructure more than any government of the country.
If that is true, why is he proposing to do all these as president? The truth Dr. Bawumia must be told is that when “your previous promises are more than your excuses, you have failed.” So, one does not need a lie detector to know that the Vice President lied in many of his lectures about his government’s accomplishments.
To paraphrase former Presidential candidate Senator Bill Bradly of the US, “How can you tell the truth as president when you cannot tell the truth as a Vice President and a candidate”?
On digitalization, Dr. Bawumia, who moved from economic messiah to digitization messiah, is proposing digitalization of things he has already claimed credit for digitalizing in the past. Despite his claim of expertise, he also seems to misunderstand the government’s role in digitization.
Transformational projects like digitization cannot succeed without the private sector’s leadership.
The role of the government is to provide infrastructure to facilitate its development. Unfortunately, unlike President Mahama’s government, the government of Bawumia has not invested in digital infrastructural provision.
In fact, we cannot conclude without exposing the hollowness of his presentation. Although Bawumia touted the marginal improvement in the microeconomic figures since Ghana enrolled in the IMF’s program, he did not discuss how to ease the excruciating suffering Ghanaians are going through. While food inflation has worsened Ghanaians’ livelihood, he is proposing digitization of agriculture instead of introducing policies to create food sufficiency. What Dr. Bawumia did not factor into his presentation is that as a driver mate, he will be running against an accomplished and experienced driver in this year’s polls, President Mahama.
Why should anybody choose a driver mate over an experienced driver or flight attendant over a captain to pilot their plane during bad weather?
He will be running against a nation builder, fixer of dumsor, creator of various funds to insulate our economy against turbulence, builder of roads, hospitals, schools, universities, and railroads, fought corruption, and economy stabilizer.
He is also running against a candidate who conceived the introduction of the first-ever 24-hour economy program in Africa to expand our economy and grow it out of the current crisis under a clear vision of “Building the Ghana we want.”
Long live the NDC. Long live Ghana. Long live the 4th Republic.
This was issued in response to the outdooring of Vice President Dr. Bawumia’s Bold Solutions for the future
