A lot has happened since the NDC took Ghana to the IMF in 2015. The financing package was under the IMF’s Extended Credit Facility for three years, backing a plan that an IMF staff team agreed on in February of that same year.
Well, let’s just say that was one of the key attacks on the NDC government prior to the 2016 elections.
Seven years later, we are back to the IMF conversation and one of the people in the NPP who made a case against the NDC’s decision to run to the IMF for “policy credibility”, Gabby Otchere-Darko, is in the crosshairs of Ghana Twitter for saying that he is not against going to the IMF in principle.
Am I against an IMF program in principle? No.
— Gabby Otchere-Darko (@GabbyDarko) June 27, 2022
The Twitter community in Ghana is very good with receipts. For example, a Twitter user named 4rina asked rhetorically if the cousin to the president thinks his followers are fools. He did so with a screenshot of Gabby celebrating Ghana’s exit from the IMF program in 2016 while taking digs at the NDC’s 2020 candidate.
You think we are fools ?? pic.twitter.com/ECvUa32ly5
— stoic (@blac4rina) June 27, 2022
Now, let me just say those are fair comments and it truly sounds disingenuous to any third party that a party that attacked their political opponent for issue A, will come into government and commit to the same issue seven years down the line. It sounds hypocritical when you think about how the NDC government was tagged incompetent for taking Ghana to the IMF but (and that’s a big but) Gabby may have a point.
The IMF was established in 1944 in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The 44 founding member countries sought to build a framework for international economic cooperation that guarantees that the world doesn’t descend into economic chaos every time something bad happens.
In 2020, something really bad happened. No country anticipated the chaos and sheer magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic and to stem the tide, countries were forced to pump billions, even trillions in some cases, to sustain their economies and protect the poor and vulnerable. The cost of those decisions is going to be ugly going forward and it has started with global stagflation.
If there was ever a time to go to the IMF, it will be now.
No matter how good your economic management as a government, COVID-19 makes nonsense of almost all economic theories so this is the time that an organization created to help nations deal with the repercussions of bad occurrences on a global scale must be called upon to help.
The big question is, will the NPP survive the optics of taking the decision to go to the IMF especially when e-Levy was sold as the panacea to going to the IMF?
According to Gabby, the e-Levy has not delivered up to 10% of projected revenues. This means the original decision not to go to the IMF must be revisited and probably revised if we want to survive. Revisiting however means that the NDC will make mincemeat of the government over their stance just a few years ago. The only difference however is that the NDC government did not have the amount of uncertainty on the global stage that the current government has to deal with prior to going to the IMF in 2015.
The NPP government can survive going to the IMF in my opinion if they can get the communication right. There’s a world of difference between going to the IMF because you mismanaged your economy in good times and managing an economy fairly well and being derailed by an act of God.
This is a seriously uncertain time and all the government needs to do is to carry the Ghanaian people along if there ever is the need to go to the IMF.
