Dr Mahamudu Bawumia’s spectacular and eye-opening diagnosis of the ailing economy continues to resonate across the country. It has offered a welcome succour to worried Ghanaians who, until his intervention, were confused about what had befallen the nation.
In National Democratic Congress (NDC) circles, it has sent party propagandists falling over one another for an appropriate response, failing which they have latched on to an African Development Bank (AfDB) seeming blunder to launch a feeble and useless attack on Bawumia for his reference to it as a secondary aside in his lecture.
They are also pointing at figures which they claim fall short of the reality. Both come nowhere near the magnitude of the travails that have beset the country as a result of bad management of the economy, which is the bottom-line of the lecture.
Onlookers of the unfolding vitriolic from NDC quarters have been constrained to wonder what dividend the verbal attacks can bring to the nation at a time of unusual crisis in the energy sector occasioned by bad governance.
They are even demanding an apology from Bawumia – a demand which prompts us to want to know whether the NDC now represents the AfDB in such matters.
But for the so-called AfDB blunder, what would the ruling party have made of the fantastic presentation which has gone to add another feather to the gentleman’s cap and led us onto another notch in our knowledge of what the real situation of Ghana is. What a gem we have in Bawumia!
The propaganda was just too much and sometimes even so cacophonous that the uninitiated were unable to follow it. Little wonder some have ended up sitting on the fence rather dejectedly, not able to make sense out of the noise on the airwaves.
Bawumia would, God-willing, continue to minnow the grains from the chaff even as money-making propagandists ply their lying trade.
The substance of the lecture is about the ailment of the economy and the circumstances which led to that situation, which was what Bawumia treated with appropriate figures and telltale instances. It stands to reason therefore that such secondary asides like Ghana being categorised among the Djiboutis and Zimbabwes by the bank and which Bawumia alluded to and which the bank claims was a blunder on its part, is an insignificant number when juxtaposed against the substance of the lecture.
Let government reverse the bad state of the economy and address the dumsor challenge which has hit industry and others so hard that nothing appears to be moving.
Fiscal indiscipline and bad governance will continue to eat into the remaining flesh of the economy, if the managers of the economy maintain this course. State departments and parastatals have been given an okay to borrow without a ceiling, just like the central government is doing. Very soon the weight of such borrowing will be so much that it will overwhelm these appendages of the state, worsening the plight of the country even further. That is the issue and not some nonsense about an AfDB correspondence. Give us a respite from this foolish propaganda.
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