Opinion: It Is the Result of the Wasteful Years of Chairman Rawlings and the NDC Abongo Boys by Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jnr., Ph.D.

Kevin Taylor is at best a nuisance whose propagandistic rants against the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) will amount to the proverbial hill-of-beans. The fact of the matter is that the decision by Governor Ernest Addison, of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), to introduce the new GHȻ 100 and 200 denominations into circulation is based squarely on the economic realities of the times, in particular the level of inflation over at least some 10 years. There is absolutely no unreflective or auto-kneejerk motive behind this policy change, unlike the kind of gross incompetence that characterized and precipitated the veritable shinplaster that was the cedi currency notes printed and recklessly circulated by the operatives of the Rawlings-led junta of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and, subsequently, the Rawlings-led veritable one-party dictatorship that was the first eight years or two terms of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Asia 728x90

There is absolutely no policy decision taken by the current Governor of the Bank of Ghana, including the introduction of the Ȼ 2 coin, that has not been done in any of the most advanced civilized democracies around the world. One would rather have expected this inveterate critic of President Akufo-Addo and the clinically blind Mahama partisan to have either written a column or done a YouTube presentation commending his political archnemesis, for literally putting his money where his proverbial mouth is, by facilitating the salutary, refreshingly restorative and therapeutic conferral of citizenship on some 126 Diaspora Africans, largely African-Caribbeans ( or Afro-Caribbeans) and African-Americans on Thursday, November 28, 2019.

You see, when former President John Dramani Mahama had the chance to wisely reconcile Ghana and the rest of the African continent with its hideous slavery past, the Bole-Bamboi, Savannah Region, native chose, instead, to grant citizenship and diplomatic status to some Arab terror suspects captured in the killing fields of Afghanistan and legitimately detained for a dozen years in a maximum security prison in the United States’ Naval Base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into our very peaceful country, at least in the post-Rawlings era. This is the kind of self-hating leader that Mr. Taylor would have Ghanaians and the rest of the world believe has higher moral principles and greater leadership competence than Nana Akufo-Addo.

There is absolutely no irony or contradiction here, as some critics of this new currency policy measure would have the rest of the general Ghanaian public believe. Yes, it is true that the government has initiated policy measures to eventually move Ghanaian society towards an electro-cashless economy. But even as Governor Addison aptly pointed out, this progressive policy initiative cannot be achieved in the offing, or the immediate future, while approximately 75-percent of Ghanaians in the business community, at least for now, prefer to deal in hard currency. At any rate, the introduction of the Ȼ 100 and Ȼ 200 paper currency denominations has not given our expert economists and policymakers any credible and/or reasonable cause to suspect the likelihood of any precipitous cedi depreciation in the offing.

So, where is the waste that ardent and inveterate Akufo-Addo critics like Mr. Taylor are jiving about? Of course, we need to know the total cost of having the new cedi denominations printed; but we are also quite certain that the total expenditure for this well-considered fiscal policy is quite certain to be much cheaper that the humongous judgment-debt payouts gleefully and recklessly engineered and supervised by the four-and-half-year Mahama-led kleptocratic regime of the National Democratic Congress. As well, even as yours truly pointed out in a previous column, here in the United Stets, we have at least 12 paper-currency denominations, including $ 500, $ 10,000 and $ 100,000 (One-Hundred-Thousand Dollar) notes. We need to also remember that grandstanding and all, under the tenure of the self-righteous founding-father of the National Democratic Congress, that is, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, Ghana’s currency notes were reckoned or commercially calculated in the millions.

Indeed, so deeply and cancerously irreparable and practically indelible was the psychological trauma and gash or running sore that was visited on the average Ghanaian psyche by Chairman Rawlings and his P/NDC Abongo Boys that even as I write, some Ghanaian adults have yet to progressively transition from counting their cedi currency notes in the millions into the far more rational and mathematically manageable current regime of pesewas, singles, tens, hundreds and, on occasion, a couple of thousands and a few millions, if any at all. You see, the abject hypocrisy of these NDC political scumbags appears to know absolutely no end. That is the “Wasteful Change” that Mr. Taylor and his blindly pro-NDC touts ought to be writing and talking about.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com  Ghanaffairs