By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 4, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

He may have been too young to remember this, but it was the foresighted decision by Dr. Hilla Limann, in retrospect, to seek an IMF-World Bank bailout for Ghana's severely ailing economy that led to the overthrow of the People's National Party (PNP) government by the Rawlings-led so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) on December 31, 1981. Today, the PNDC has expediently morphed into the so-called National Democratic Congress.

At the time, as I vividly recall, the self-righteous Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings, shortly thereafter the know-it-all Chairman Rawlings, mordantly lambasted Dr. Limann's handling of the economy, asserting imperiously that the PNP was the most disgraceful government in Ghana's postcolonial history. Chairman Rawlings also claimed that a grossly incompetent President Limann had skyrocketted the inflationary rate upwards of the 100-percentage mark. Interestingly, twenty years later, when he handed over the reins of governance to the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party, Mr. Rawlings had fabulously upped the inflationary rate well above the 1,000-percentage mark.

Pontifical hot-air and all, by early 1983, Chairman Rawlings was, literally, down on all fours pleading with the Bretton Woods Group to promptly intervene in the country's effectively collapsed economy. Throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s, the country will be hooked onto a life-support regimen called the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). The latter simply amounted to a far harsher economic austerity measure than the far better intellectually and professionally equipped Dr. Limann had envisaged for the country's economic recovery. His obstinate bluster had ensured that by the time that he threw in the towel, the economic crisis that President Limann had inherited from the Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), a three-month long junta whose key actors had absolutely no clue about the workings of a national economy, had further worsened into a state of emergency.

This pretty much explains the development of the acute economic mess that engendered what widely and derisively came to be known as the "Rawlings Necklace." The latter referred to the severe emaciation of many a hardworking Ghanaian blue-collar worker, manifested in the form of the prominent protuberance of one's collar bone. Indeed, so harsh were the Rawlings-initiated austerity measures that a remarkable percentage of Ghanaian citizens are known and reported to have committed suicide. It was also quite common to hear of a desperate urban-resident single mother serving up the family's apocalyptic last dinner, or supper, laced with DDT or some such poisonous chemical, rather than endure the excruciating pangs of chronic hunger and the abject humiliation of having to beg for one's next meal.

The exact number of citizens so buffeted and destroyed by such epic economic mismanagement may never be known; it may have to be thoroughly researched by a bevy of vanguard scholar-sociologists and nutritionists of the highest caliber available, both within and outside the country. We shall also never know the objective extent to which Chairman Rawlings' gross mismanagement of the Ghanaian economy contributed to the climate of rank moral decadence, in particular prostitution, naked theft and armed robbery. We know a little bit more about the state of armed robbery, because Chairman Rawlings was the preeminent robber-baron.

Well, if as Deputy Communications Minister Felix Kwakye-Ofosu claims, the Mahama government is smack-dab on top of the country's economic affairs, then precisely what explains the reason(s) behind the government's recent covening of a cross-partisan national conference on how to put the economy back on an even keel? You would have thought that the operatives of a party that fought so fiercely to regain the reins of governance, would at least be fairly well-equipped to execute its so-called BETTER GHANA AGENDA. In sum, what I want to underscore here is the fact that more than any other significant political party in the country, the National Democratic Congress is the most IMF-World Bank addicted.

And being so unhealthily addicted to the IMF and World Bank does not show much or adequate competence on the part of the supplicant. The Bretton-Woods institutions exist to give a helping hand to countries whose leaders have not quite learned how to crawl, let alone walk and run.

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