Many Ghanaians have wondered why our governments continue to borrow when it is evidently clear that we are dead trapped in debt. They cannot be wrong if their assertion is analysed based on previous experience which ended us in the infamous Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) status.
They may also be justified considering the disconnect between our debt and the progress we have made with borrowed funds. Conveniently, however, it may make sense to argue that there is nothing wrong with borrowing, after all, the wealthiest country on planet Earth — the United States of America — borrows.
The mango and apple comparison is the challenge here.
Why our borrowing has, rather, led to the near collapse of our agricultural sector — the mainstay of our economy — and made us perpetually dependent on the global north remains the biggest disservice our elites have done to us.
A child born in Ghana today is faced with loans to pay. Sadly, some of the loans have durations higher than the life expectancy rate of the child, all things being equal. This notwithstanding, some of our honourable men and women have enough liquid and invested assets capable of taking care of their children beyond their life expectancy rates.
Those at the receiving end of this ‘injustice’ will certainly be unhappy that we have turned a blind eye to the liberal democratic belief in collective reasoning and the propensity for collective progress in freedom and justice. We have, instead, imbibed the realist ideal and have accepted the world of ceaseless repetitive struggle for power where the minority strong continues to dominate the majority weak with alacrity.
For us in Ghana, we have even gone past the Marxian optimism of a good future for the proletariat, and are now in the stage where the majority proletariats are divided with one group continually on the tangent of defence of the injustice meted to us and the future generation by the elites who have the power to distribute state responses.
The structure of our country and the framework within which we have accepted to govern ourselves perfectly suits this class struggle. The 1985 ‘fiat justitia, pereat mundus mantra’ by Morgenthau favours our political class whether you look at it as ‘let justice be done even if Ghana perishes or let injustice be done even if Ghana perishes.’
Changing the narrative
Two of the running stories in Ghana — the Saglemi Housing Project and the Bank of Ghana (BoG) saga — are a perfect fit in this narrative.
The structure of the BoG on one hand and other state institutions such as the executive and its organs like the Attorney General and Ministry of Justice together with other prosecutorial agencies are such that they can if they wish to act legally and it will remain legal!
The above notion has long been captured by Thucydides’ work —The Peloponnesian War in which he opined that the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel…the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak to accept what they have to accept. Really, do we have a choice apart from banging our hopes on the day of judgement?
After 30 years of the Fourth Republic, it is only fair that we streamline things and depart from this kind of animal farm scenario where some people are treated differently under the same complex legal framework.
Reports that houses dubbed affordable funded by loans to be re-paid by the poor are not within their reach is one such joke in our democratic dispensation. But for the fact that nothing surprises the average Ghanaian any longer, one would have been astonished to read any report on who and who has actually acquired apartments in the successful housing projects in our country.
As if this is not enough, our governments have the effrontery of abandoning so-called affordable housing projects and starting new ones knowing very well that the tax of the already over impoverished Ghanaian has gone into it. And there are always justifications — legal and moral — for this vicious cycle of mediocracy.
The recent layer to this issue is the alleged state-protected thievery at the Saglemi Housing Project site. How thieves could get access to the project site and make away with construction materials worth millions of Ghana cedis at the time the state is finding it difficult to complete the project because of liquidity challenges is a mystery. But we are told that the site is under the watch of security personnel from both the Ghana Police Service and National Security. They have not denied it so far.
If this is collusion to do the Ghanaian evil, then it is in order to remind ourselves of Machiavelli’s advice that people, in general, are ungrateful, fickle and deceitful, eager to avoid dangers and avid for gain. They are all with you, offering you their blood, their property and loyalty because you are useful to them and danger is remote, but when it approaches they turn on you.
Certainly, the state of the sun in the morning does not accurately determine how windy or cloudy the day will be.
Source: Dr George Asekere
The writer is a lecturer, Department of Political Science, University of Education, Winneba
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