In the United States, $461 million would fund 584 feet of Boston's Big Dig highway project, says the Washington Times. In Mali, however, that amount of money will build a 247-acre industrial park, remodel an airport and provide irrigation for almost 62 square miles of West African farmland. This was the paper’s reaction to the compact that was signed between Ambassador John J Danilovich, chief executive officer of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and Moctar Ouane, Malian Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

Mali's President Amadou Toure told the Washington audience at the signing that his country views the grant as a reward for good governance. "The people of Mali deserve credit for making sacrifices to pursue democracy," he said, describing the $461m as “the jackpot” because Mali got the second largest MCA grant to date, after Ghana. Like Malians, Ghanaians have made a lot of sacrifices over the last couple of decades, and it is reasonable for the peoples to think that now is pay back time.

“The first and most important lesson that history teaches about what monetary policy can do – and it is a lesson of the most profound importance – is that monetary policy can prevent money itself from being a major source of economic disturbance,” wrote Milton Friedman in 1968. This is a lesson that the NDC learned the hard way, culminating in electoral defeat in 2000. They tried to pretend fiscal discipline while spending their way for votes and short-term glory.

Isn't it laudable that the national budget is read in November, two months before the budget year? But, what if the NDC had read the 2001 budget in November 2000? Since a new government is not bound by the policies yet to be implemented by the previous government, may be we should make election year an exception or risk duplicity in an event of a change in government.

Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu may not be gifted with the expressiveness or immodesty of a Yaw Osafo-Maafo. But the man is a stickler for accounting detail, who seems to have a no-fizz kind of one-gear mind on getting the job done and with the impatience of a Michael Schumacher foot on the throttle in getting Ghana to the middle income finishing line by 2015. For example, Mr Osafo-Maafo in February 2004, had projected for 2006 an indicative nominal GDP of ¢97.3 trillion and total receipts (and expenditure) of ¢28.1 trillion, less than ¢4 trillion higher than the 2004 budget target. This year, provisional data shows that nominal GDP will be ¢112 trillion and receipts of over ¢41 trillion. It is by all means not a good time to be NDC. In fact it never really has been since the NPP took over the economy in January 2001.

But, President John Agyekum Kufuor and his Cabinet would have been saddened and frustrated by the apparent failure of the nation (at least through the voices of radio and TV commentators since last Thursday) to acknowledge the phenomenal achievements of the NPP on the economy as captured in the 2007 budget. In an environment of competitive politics, where propaganda is over-priced and facts and figures suffer from deflationary pressures, we cannot, however, but make informed use of what is available to make a factual, eye-opening comparative analysis between what used to be and what is. Let us just look at the last six years under the National Democratic Congress and compare it to the first six years of the New Patriotic Party:

From 1995 to 2000, the value of the local currency, the cedi, fell by 376.4% to the US dollar – ¢1,446 to ¢6,889. From January 2001 to date, it has depreciated by 33.7% to $1 - ¢6,889 to ¢9,212. This is huge by any stretch of partisan imagination.

Inflation, which basically means price increases, has been cut by half under the NPP. From 1995 to 2000, prices of goods and services in the consumer basket increased by 196.5% (in fact prices of some goods rose by over 300% over the period and others by 30%). Same way in recent years prices of some consumer goods, such as petrol, have shot up by over 300%, but when the price changes of all the usual commodities in the basket are checked, the accumulative inflation rate under the NPP since 2001 has been 98.9%. It means that whiles prices have doubled under the NPP, when you compare it to a similar period under the NDC, prices of things in that same basked quadrupled. If we are able to achieve single digit end-of-year inflation in 2006, it will be the first time since 1971!

These, fellow Ghanaians, are the bare facts, stripped of any political spin. We hear of giddy talk such as the macro-economic gains are not reflecting in the pockets of Kofi and Ama. The fact is, if Kofi and Ama are unemployed, even if inflation is so suppressed that it stays under 1%, that will be 1% more of money they never had. Secondly, Kofi and Ama may do us all a favour by carefully examining additional costs to their own basket of consumables in the last few years. How many ordinary Ghanaians own mobile phones today who did not in 2000? Owning a mobile phone means regular additional expenditure due to top ups.

The Ghanaian economy is growing at a pace never before experienced since Independence. Indeed, if the pace of annual growth of the economy in the last six years was achieved in the previous six years, the economy would have been about $11 billion in 2000. Instead, between 1997 and 2000 Ghana’s GDP only grew from $3.8 billion to $3.94 billion. This year it is expected to hit beyond $12 billion and $15 billion in 2007. This is exceptional growth. And, in Qanawu’s view it is a combination of sound management and delayed benefits of structural reforms of yesteryears. Those benefits were delayed because it seemed as if under Jerry John Rawlings we had a leader who accepted neo-liberalism but did not believe in it and did not therefore apply the requisite discipline and foresight to see the real benefits.

The private sector should be more aggressive in taking advantage of what is happening to the Ghanaian economy today for it is only they who can sustain it. And they should do so with the view of making cross-border incursions in our region. Interest rates averaging 27% are still high, but almost half of what they used to be under the NDC. So far, Ghana’s fringe play in globalisation has seen us more as receiver of goods rather than a producer and exporter of goods. Now is the time to go out there and reap the sweat and toil of free market reforms of the eighties.

Interestingly, on the very day that Baah-Wiredu was reading his budget, one of the most highly influential economists, political commentators and essayists of the century died. Milton Friedman, aged 94, was described in the Guardian by Charles Goodhart as one of the greatest economists of all time, who may come to be included in the same category of pre-eminent figures as Adam Smith, Ricardo, Marx and John Maynard Keynes. Ironically, news of his death passed through Ghana like good news, unnoticed. Yet, he was one of the main intellectual pillars behind the neo-liberal economic paradigm that from 1983 onwards Ghana was forced to embark on under the so-called Washington Consensus, the name that economist John Williamson gave in 1989 to a list of ten policy recommendations for countries willing to reform their economies.

While professor at Chicago University in the 1950s and 60s, Keynesian orthodoxy – state intervention and spending-driven economic growth – dominated macro-economics thinking. “By the time Friedman's project was mostly complete, in the 1970s and 80s – with a Nobel prize in 1976 – that orthodoxy had been shattered,” says Goodhart. Keynesianism advocates demand management, mostly in the form of fiscal policy, to tackle unemployment, for example. An ardent opponent of the Keynesian economics, Friedman the monetarist believed that government intervention did harm, and that the best economy would be a liberal free-market economy.

At the core of Reaganomics and Thatcherism is Milton Friedman. With the dominance of these two leaders in the early 1980s, the era of neo-liberalism was born and so effective was this economic theory that even a young, half-educated revolutionary like Flt Lt Rawlings was forced to turn right even though his heart, mind and signals were all indicating left. The experiment took off in the developing world with Gen Pinochet's Chile in the wake of his (US-sponsored) coup against Salvador Allende in 1973. Pinochet's advisors, “Los Chicago Boys” – Milton Friedman and other “monetarist” economists from the University of Chicago – began to exert more general influence over Third World development, particularly as the Third World debt crisis emerged and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund gained more power to direct national economic policies.

The neo-liberal axis of Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl in the 1980s ensured the economic takeover of the free-market ideology. This rise could only have been helped by the 1989 shredding process of the Iron Curtain. At the time John Williamson summarised what he saw as the consensus that had emerged among the “political” Washington of the US Congress, the Administration and the “technocratic” Washington of the IMF, Ghana was going through the necessary pain of structural adjustment, which not even PAMSCAD could sooth. As one expert puts it, during this decade, the world was under the impression that there was a clear and robust consensus about what a poor country should do to become more prosperous. Another irony is that even though his ideas were gladly adopted by the IMF, Friedman advocated for the abolition of the Bretton Wood institution. This view is shared by such long-time free trade institutions as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.

His argument was that the IMF was established at Bretton Woods in 1944 to serve one purpose only: to supervise the operation of the system of fixed exchange rates established at Bretton Woods. That system ended on August 15, 1971, when President Nixon, as part of a package of economic changes including wage and price ceilings, closed the gold window; that is, he ended the commitment that the United States had undertaken at Bretton Woods to buy and sell gold at $35 an ounce.

“With the official death of the Bretton Woods system in 1973, the IMF should have been abolished. But few things are so permanent as government agencies, including international agencies. The IMF, sitting on a pile of funds, sought and found a new function: serving as an economic consulting agency to countries in trouble. It found plenty of clients, even though its advice was not always good,” Friedman wrote in 1998.

His death coincides with the year that Ghana has come out from being strictly dictated to by the IMF. Our last poverty reduction and growth facility programme expired October 31. This means we are not getting any more funds from the Fund, but the international money market is our oyster. If President Kufuor’s sound management of the economy so far is any guide, then we can trust the NPP to borrow wisely to fund our race to middle income status.