[ 2014-04-02 ]

Nii Moi Thompson largely agreed with Dr. Bawumia
He is not levelling up with Ghanaians, when Dr.
Nii Moi Thompson asserts that the "Bank of Ghana
is an independent institution that is separate
from the Government and carries out its own
independent actions".

Even every reasonably well-schooled Ghanaian
elementary pupil is well aware of the fact that
unlike the Federal Reserve (Bank) of the United
States, the Bank of Ghana is the veritable
marionette, or play toy, of Ghana's government of
the day.

And it can scarcely be disputed that the decision
of who heads, or manages, our national treasury
decidedly belongs to the extant President of
Ghana, with absolutely no input, whatsoever, from
our national assembly or Parliament.

In our time, as it was with the heydays of the
Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP), the
shot-caller, as it were, is none other than
President John Dramani Mahama. And going by his
relationship with the immediate-past Governor of
the Bank of Ghana, Mr. Paa Kwesi Bekoe
Amissah-Arthur, the decision of who heads the Bank
of Ghana has continued to be inescapably
political.

And this may be significantly answerable for the
cause of the country's raging economic crisis.
Today, Mr. Amissah-Arthur is the substantive
Vice-President of Ghana. He had also, up to the
moment of his selection as the running-mate of
then-Transitional President John Dramani Mahama,
been widely known to have been a card-carrying
member of the ruling National Democratic Congress
(NDC).

And going back to 1957, the first year of our
country's reassertion of its sovereignty from
British colonial rule, the Governor of the Bank of
Ghana has always primarily served at the behest of
our sitting President. The exact same situation
prevails in Nigeria, Ghana's closest political
ally and rival in the West African sub-region.

And so it is at once rather disingenuous, curious
and amusing for Dr. Thompson, a dyed-in-the-wool
rump-Convention People's Party operative, to
impugn the intellectual and professional integrity
of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, an immediate-former
Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana.

We must also, once again, quickly point out that
it was Dr. Bawumia who headed the blue-ribbon team
of crackerjack Ghanaian economists and monetary
experts that re-denominated and revaluated the
Cedi, our national monetary currency, from the
veritable shinplaster that the Rawlings-led
National Democratic Congress government had
rendered the same by the close of the year 2000.

It is also not clear precisely what he means, when
Dr. Thompson, presently described as an economic
advisor to President Mahama, means when he asserts
that Dr. Bawumia only focused on one aspect of the
Single-Spine Salary Structure, to wit, "the
wage-bill component" of the latter wage-equity
measure.

Just what is the second aspect of the SSSS which,
in the opinion of Dr. Thompson, was left out of
the all-too-comprehensive lecture presented by the
2012 Vice-Presidential Candidate of the New
Patriotic Party (NPP) on the Prampram campus of
the Mensa Otabil-led Central University College,
headquartered in Accra?

The fact of the matter is that the State
University of New York (SUNY)-educated Dr.
Thompson lies through his proverbial teeth when he
rather cavalierly and dismissively claims that the
Mahama government has already begun implementing
most of the managerial solutions proposed by Dr.
Bawumia, among them the imperative need to stanch
revenue leakage or defective tax-collection
system, the Mahama government's seemingly
inordinate addiction to loan contracting, and
abject theft and corruption among the executive
membership of the same.

If, indeed, such reparative measures are already
in effect, as Dr. Thompson so glibly claims, then
precisely how long have these measures been
operative? And, also, why do these measures not
seem to be having the desired impact on our
national economy?

He may pretty much know where his proverbial bread
is buttered all right, for this is also another
critical aspect of serving as an economic advisor
to a sitting President of Ghana, particularly one
who knows a diddly little to nothing about the
intricate dynamics of managing a national economy,
but Dr. Thompson cannot so facilely presume most
Ghanaians to be too daft, and stolid, to have
fully appreciated the dire implications of the
recent concerns raised by leaders and economics
experts from such global institutions as the
IMF-World Bank, regarding the apparently reckless
foreign-loan contractual binges by the Mahama-led
government of the so-called National Democratic
Congress.

Source - Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.

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