Until Ghana faces up to its precarious financial situation and acts in a manner that reflects its current condition, future economic growth and development will be greatly compromised, the CEO of Dalex Finance has said.
Mr Kenneth Kwamena Thompson, in his message at a Chartered Institute of Ghana (CIMG) event, Tuesday February 23, asserted that Ghana’s economic woes defy solutions mainly due to a “Rat Race” defined as, a fiercely competitive struggle for wealth by corrupt means.
He said the country’s political elite on both sides of the political divide and their complicit technocrats are the ones engaged in this “Rat Race”.
“Now we are broke, and that is self-inflicted,” Ken Thompson asserted adding that this is reflected in the fact that “our borrowing is foolhardy, our taxation is inequitable, and we cannot feed our people
This, he said, must not be confused with external shocks due to the current global economic slowdown, the collapsing prices of our commodity exports, including gold and oil, and the appreciation of the US dollar, which continue to weigh on the economy.
“But we fail to face up to our being broke and continue to act in the same manner.
“This means our children will suffer in the near future; when they go to hospital they will not receive quality health service, they will go hungry because they cannot produce food to feed themselves, among other failures,” Thompson lamented.
“Every day that we do not do the things that we know we have to, our children will suffer the more. The sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children – our children will suffer because we are not doing the right things.”
He argued that, scrutinising the spread sheet and considering government borrowings over recent years, both externally and on the domestic market, we have woken up to find our giraffe on a tree and how to get it down is the challenge.
“But we can turn things around,” Thompson says.
“It’s not that we don’t have resources; we have human resources, we have natural resources, we have the people. We know what to do, but I don’t know why we are doing this to ourselves,” he bemoaned.
“Why, for instance, would we allocate GHC136m of the petroleum revenue earmarked for five specific interventions, to capacity building and only GHC27m to agriculture? It means we’re not willing to feed ourselves but to continue in the rat race.”
Thompson maintains that agriculture continues to be a fundamental instrument for sustainable development and poverty reduction and that it is still the key to Ghana’s economic development
The Dalex Finance CEO advocates that the nation must face up to being broke as a first step on the road to recovery
“We subsequently should focus on investing in agriculture, and enforce the existing rules of showing equivalent tax returns when registering any property such as land, houses, companies and cars.”
Ken Thompson finally advocates harsh punishment for corruption to help plug the massive leakages of financial resources.
by: Emmanuel Kwablah/businessworldghana