Open letter to incoming President

As you sit on the seat come January 7, 2025, amidst the joy, pomp and circumstance that may be associated with the occasion, kindly reflect on the following areas:

Corruption and perceptions of corruption in government, in my view, set the stage for disappointment among Ghanaians in a political party voted into office.

When Ghanaians hear of corruption in government circles from the media, see politicians becoming wealthy overnight and flaunting their wealth, while promises made, upon which they based their vote to elect the said politicians, are not fulfilled, with a tedious life for the citizens, they begin to advise themselves as to their voting patterns the next time.

Sound economic management of the country, I believe, shall constitute a veritable guarantee of your re-election into office. These facets of the economy need attention:

Perennial depreciation of the cedi against major international currencies, such as the dollar, the euro and the pound. A free fall of the cedi has serious ripple effects on all segments of the economy. 

The Ghanaian business person who imports goods from the US and Europe will need to change cedis into dollars or euros/pounds and if the exchange rate of the cedi to these currencies keeps depreciating, the business person has to continuously increase prices of goods, not because the exporter has increased prices, but because he or she has incurred foreign exchange losses which must be passed on to the buyer.  

Inflation, the rate at which prices of consumer goods and services have periodically been soaring in the country, is also a bane to the economy with the depreciation of the cedi.

Be it demand pull or cost push, inflation in the country, currently hovering around 20 per cent, must be addressed with appropriate fiscal interventions. And the high interest rate in the country, also allied to inflationary rate as stipulated in the Irving Fisher model, must be addressed using appropriate monetary interventions. The current BoG policy rate of 27 per cent must be looked at.

The unemployment problem in the country must also be addressed. Year after year, countless students graduate from tertiary and other institutions and need to be employed. Although most of them are trained in entrepreneurship to be self-employed, the hitch is that of finance.

I have seen several unemployed youth in game centres wasting away when they could otherwise be productive in certain sectors of the economy. The government must provide real employment, not transient jobs.

Your government must go into agriculture and not relegate it to the individual farmers, the only interest shown in the celebration of national farmers’ days.

Ghana is endowed with vast expanses of arable lands with a small stretch of rainforest in the Western North Region. And what are we doing with those? We need to harness them for development as our neighbour La Cote d’Ivoire is doing.

A small increase in fuel prices has a reverberating effect on all prices, so some taxes on fuel prices need to be removed.

Anastas Kabral Nyamikeh (PhD), 
Adjunct Lecturer,
Faculty of Engineering, Science and Computing,
Pentecost University,
Accra. 
E-mail: aknyamikeh@pentvars.edu.gh