Editorial (The Daily Searchlight, Monday, March 28th, 2022)
The Finance Minister, Mr. Ken Ofori Atta, is reported to have stated that the west should hang its head in shame due to it’s the response of rich countries and multilateral institutions to the Covid-19 pandemic’s financial impact on poor countries. (Ref: ‘Pandemic financial response ignored poor countries’ concerns, says Ghana minister’, front page, the Daily Searchlight culled from the Financial Times, February 20, 2022).
He has stated that the response of the West was ‘inadequate and ignored the concerns of governments’ and the ‘private sector’.
Ken Ofori-Atta argued that measures to provide debt relief during the pandemic, such as the debt service suspension initiative, did not take into account the views of developing countries or private sector lenders. He said the DSSI did not reduce the amount of debt owed, while participating countries did not ask for relief from the private sector for fear of losing access to commercial debt markets.
“The west should hang its head in shame,” Ofori-Atta told the Financial Times in an interview. “There was a complete distance between the resources available and what was applied [beyond advanced economies] to a problem that was global.” To address the problem, he called for a rethink of the global financial architecture led by the World Bank, the IMF and other institutions set up during and after the Second World War.
“We need to seriously evaluate whether the rules laid down [then] are the most appropriate going forward,” he said.
The Daily Searchlight states that the continued ‘dependent child to parent posture’ adopted by African leaders such as Mr. Ofori-Atta towards the West and the Bretton Woods Institutions, continues to be wholly unacceptable in the light of the African continent’s apparent resources, in terms of human resource and raw material base.
We believe that the African continent was wholly capable of responding adequately to the problems created by Covid-19. If anything, any relationship with other nations, particularly the West, should have been on information and resource sharing as against information and resource dependency.
Indeed, the Covid-19 also offered African economies an unprecedented opportunity to cooperate and lift themselves towards developing their productive capacity, in the area of business development and the social needs of the people, an advantage that has now been completely lost.
We believe that the Finance Minister would do well to recall and go back the ‘Ghana Beyond Aid’ mantra that was supposed to be the operational principle of the NPP Administration, which is gradually dying into a hopeless whimper.
The continual portrayal of Ghana and Africa as a basket case of the ‘beggar continent’ who depend on the West and the Breton Woods institutions to do the thinking and the heavy lifting, by leaders Mr. Ken Ofori Atta, is wholly unacceptable, and they would do well to desist from this practice.
If anything, it is we Africans who should hang our heads in shame for failing to see the clear economic advantages that Covid-19 offered for our economies.
And the fact that we have placed ourselves, through years of basic inadequacy, into a position of dependence.
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