Dear Mr. President-elect, congratulations and welcome back.
You won the elections. Do not gloat. Please, do not waste your time on unnecessary victory celebrations, showing off, and waiting for sycophants to come and kiss your ring in a display of power. Your victory is not about elections, it is about whether this country has a future. People are rightfully expecting change, they have a reason to expect change.
Mr. President-elect, we need not remind you that dangers and opportunities lie ahead with the changing of the guard. One huge danger is the accumulation and centralization of power in your little hands. The desire to dominate and control, to plan other people’s lives, to push citizens around and distribute wealth to your cronies, to monopolize the country’s wealth — all these elements of a ‘power trip’ will further increase poverty among the people.
There will inevitably be opportunities to reconcile the nation too. But to take advantage of the opportunities, you must stop the atavistic, haphazard, fragmented efforts at playing God that have always increased the problems hindering our progress. Playing God has failed successive governments since independence. Far from you and your next administration continuing to play God yet more vigorously, this is the time to retire from playing the role of God, as you lead the nation for the next four years.
Mr. President-elect, you of all people will know that Ghanaian politicians have been prodigal. The budget groans with the weight of so many fiscal sins too many to detail here: populist social programmes where logic and efficiency are thrown to the winds of political expediency; outrageous contracts padded to line the pockets of individuals; a less than hospitable attitude towards poor farmers and the informal economy. These atrocities against the producers in the Ghanaian economy, attest to the desire of Ghanaian politicians to rape the citizens and their reprehensible unwillingness to consider the economic and social consequences.
Remember, the political class and their academic elites are a pack of wolves. They are all predators. To succeed, you will have to better bring a whip and a determined goal because without that they will eat you alive. Of course, the citizens are a pack of wolves too, but these are fat, toothless wolves more concerned with their daily chores and making ends meet than anything else. In this country, if you show weakness, if you show hesitation or doubt, if you show an iota of greed and partisanship, Ghanaians are going to look at you, shake their heads, and you are going to fail.
The attitude you need to fix Ghana’s biggest problem, which fortunately, is not the lack of resources, is the collapse of the warrior culture, a culture that must be dedicated to only one thing: visionary leadership. You can do it. You can do it the way genuine leaders do it. Take charge, assemble a solid team, and refuse to accept anything less than the standard. To be a leader, you have to lead. Tell your team, “This is what I want; make it happen or pack up.” That is how leaders think. That is how leaders win.
Everything hinges on the economy. Everything.
Mr. President-elect, You must fix the economy. You must make it work for all citizens, irrespective of party colours or tribe. The economy should enable Ghanaians living everywhere able to support themselves and their families. If you fail to do that, nothing matters. Ghanaians are tired of partisanship greed and the corruption nonsense, tired of being abused, and tired of seeing citizens pushed aground, but mostly, they are tired of buying twenty-five cedi loaf of bread. If you do not get it right, you fail.
What does a come-back president need to do? You need to cut taxes on local manufacturers. You need to remove taxes on most imports and reduce inflation. You need to slash regulations to allow companies to grow. And you need to cut the deficit to help lower interest rates. Stop embracing a loser-free lunch mentality. Focus on one thing and one thing only – growing local entrepreneurs and destroying as many leeches on the economy as quickly and brutally as possible. This is the best way to put the economy on a war footing and the best way to enable Ghanaians to create wealth.
And there are a lot of wrongs to fix. Unbridled partisanship and cronyism need to be fixed – no more jobs for the boys. The mindset that rewards the power-grasp of bureaucrats needs to be fixed – on day one. The civil service requires reform. Corruption and inefficiency are not just occasional oversight; they are fundamental characteristics of the public sector elites who are not only interested in money but are keenly interested in power. Power for what? The power to redistribute power to the government, where they have the major say in how it is exercised. This shows in the spiral of mismanagement of funds, mounting debt, and poor service delivery in all sectors of the economy.
So just bringing a firehose to clean out critics and those who worked with the last regime, changing people to do the same job of protecting the ‘public interest’ against the ‘private interest’ is not going to work, which means a fundamental overhaul — or even abolition — of the civil service power structure to break government activity and economic tyranny in Ghana.
We remember your many promises to the electorate, and you must fulfill them. However, addressing the development issues in our country requires a strong desire to break the Ponzi game style of borrowing heavily to finance those promises. Reducing poverty is not about issuing notes and bonds to fund those promises. Indeed, your economic blueprint should not include asking the poor to continue subsidizing the government’s deficit spending.
We hope you understand that using the same old solutions from the IMF and the World Bank to address our poverty will only lead to ongoing disappointment and will not help our country generate local wealth. Contrary to popular belief, the aid system has failed to foster legitimate entrepreneurial activity in our nation. Your focus should be on creating a functioning economy, and the policies implemented should offer real solutions rather than just temporary fixes.
We need fundamental change, and that fundamental change is not creating new entitlement programmes for the poor and political cronies. Economic programmes should focus on lifting key controls and inequalities between people and regions by strengthening the pillars of the economy, weakened by crony businesspeople who demand and receive short-term advantages from the state.
Your primary goal should be to establish a strong, independent Ghanaian economy that is managed and controlled by Ghanaian capital. Ghana must get back to work and empower its citizens. When people feel prosperous, they experience a greater sense of well-being.
When you effectively manage our budgeting and align it with the interests of citizens, not your vote-catching interests, positive change will begin to unfold. The annual budget should serve as the primary tool for policy-making, goal-setting, and monitoring outcomes. The budget must not get lost in the personal financial gains of politicians and bureaucrats. Additionally, we must avoid spending hundreds of billions of cedis to subsidize projects and activities that enrich corrupt individuals. And for the administrative state, when we cut the power of the bureaucrats, we must also cut the red tape that holds our economy and our entrepreneurs back.
Mr. President-elect, we surely remember the many welfare promises you made. The question is: what magic combination of taxation, deficit financing, and monetary stimulation would you adopt to provide those promises and solve our problems this time? We need not remind you that you can confiscate our savings, redistribute what you have confiscated, or continue borrowing, and by printing baseless money, you cannot create wealth. You can only inject bigger doses of inflation and unemployment into the weak economy.
Finally, Mr. President-elect, what makes nations prosperous is production and technological innovation. Wealth has never been created from government offices or presidential edicts but from a free market. To develop this country, therefore, we need a thriving free market economy and property rights. We demand accountability. And we can have the rule of law. We can foster creativity and promote patriotism. We can have that Ghana.
And if you, Mr. President-elect, want to succeed, you will lead us that way.
