Your Ghana, My Ghana: From ‘slogan to strategy’: Can Ghana’s 24-hour economy be the next ‘big push’?

After months of budding expectation, the government’s flagship 24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development (24-Hour Plus) programme was launched to a packed auditorium at the Accra International Conference Centre on Wednesday, July 2. 

Since then, analysts have been scrutinising the speeches given by President John Mahama, who launched the programme to repeated applause, and his Presidential Advisor, Augustus Goosie Tanoh, who led the team that put the strategy together.

President Mahama described the 24-Hour Plus (24H+) initiative as a “national reset” agenda and as “moving beyond political rhetoric to a coherent, multi-sectoral economic transformation agenda.”

“Today, we reclaim our founder’s vision of a self-reliant, industrious and inclusive African nation that works with its creativity and ensures prosperity for all,” the President said.

Launched a day after Ghana’s Republic Day anniversary, there were numerous references by both speakers to the work done by the Republic’s founder, Dr Kwame Nkrumah. 

Nkrumah’s big push

Nkrumah’s big push for industrialisation revolved around huge infrastructure projects such as the Akosombo Dam, which he envisaged as key to creating an integrated and mature economy.

One question on everyone’s mind, what the 24-hour economy implies for labour policy, was answered first by Goosie Tanoh in his speech: “It doesn’t mean we’ll be working 24 hours”, the Presidential Advisor said.

The concept speaks to the intention to push up the economy from its current 40% capacity utilisation rate. A production efficiency rate of 80-85% might be considered optimal.

Depth and focus

In its essence, 24H+ is a neatly packaged programme anchored on three goals: transforming production, markets and human capital.

The programme comprises 50 projects built on eight pillars with catchy themes: Grow 24 (food and agriculture), Make 24 (manufacturing), Build 24 (infrastructure), Show 24 (tourism and creative arts), Connect 24 (physical and digital connectivity), Fund 24 (finance), Aspire 24 (skills) and Go 24 (mobilising citizens).

“This structure ensures depth and focus,” said Mahama in his speech. “We’re not attempting to fix everything everywhere all at once. We’re targeting high impact, job-rich and export-oriented sectors with strong forward and backwards linkages,” the President said.

The programme aims to create 1.7 million quality jobs over four years.

Volta Economic Corridor

The lightning rod for turning this beautiful rhetoric into reality is the Volta Economic Corridor project, a reincarnation of Nkrumah’s dream.

It envisages the irrigation of two million hectares of land surrounding the Volta Lake for intensive agriculture, as well as establishment of agro-industrial parks.

Overall, the 24H+ initiative provides much of the framework for allocating the 2025 “Big Push” budget presented to Parliament by incoming Finance Minister Dr Ato Forson in March.

The budget statement raised expectations and promised enabling legislation such as review of the Labour Act and a legislative framework for establishing the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod), together with measures agreed with the Bank of Ghana to manage the exchange rate and inflation.

President Mahama in his launch speech described 24H+ as a “call to national action” and a “new model of economic development grounded in productivity, powered by the private sector and coordinated by the state.”

Public-private partnership doesn’t sound very novel.

But what does seem novel in Ghana is to get the private sector, during a four-year term in government, to finance a programme seemingly as ambitious as Nkrumah’s Seven-Year Development plan. 

This means that a lot may ride on the ‘Go-24’ ability to mobilise people and resources for a transformation agenda.

Nimble secretariat

If the organisation of the launch was anything to go by, the programme promises to be run by a nimble and efficient secretariat.

The event started promptly at 10am as billed. Besides the MC, there were just two speakers, the Presidential Advisor, Goosie Tanoh and President John Mahama himself. 

Sectoral ministers and others with a role to play were captured in a series of neat video interviews that were screened before and after the two main speeches.

Kwame Nkrumah’s “big push” comprised a modernisation drive to equip the former Gold Coast colony with an integrated economy capable of competing on an equal footing with the former colonial power, Britain.

What amount of goodwill will make this new transformation agenda succeed?

Mahama’s demeanour

The first factor in the government’s favour is the demeanour of the President. After eight years in opposition and with the prospect of just one term left in office, Mahama has approached his first six months back in office with an air of sincerity and humility, together with a pledge to leave a lasting legacy.

Unlocking the 24-hour economy will depend on a constant supply of power. Mahama’s drubbing at the 2016 elections was preceded by a period of 24-hour dumsor.

But Ghana is blessed with an abundance of sunshine, and 24H+ representatives see the development of solar energy as the key to solving once and for all the problem of electricity.

Luck and strong policies

The 24H+ initiative comes amid a surge in Ghana’s luck. Historically high prices for gold and cocoa, the low dollar and the swift end to Israel’s war on Iran all combined to create propitious conditions for the launch of the programme.

The new GoldBod provides a regulatory body that will impose tougher policies to stem the illegal export of gold while stimulating the refining of gold into finished products.

Other decisive actions, such as moves to stabilise the banking sector and the bold decision to keep a stronger Ghana cedi stable at between GH¢ 10 and ¢12 to the dollar, are welcome.

This policy is in the opposite direction of IMF stabilisation conditionalities that typically push for local currency devaluation, and it does throw into question whether this won’t make it easier for an already highly import-dependent economy to import even more at the expense of exports.

At the same time, it does show some determination to get a high-inflation economy under control, thereby fulfilling an election pledge.

Once these interventionist measures are demonstrated to be backed by a surge in production and value addition, conditions will be ripe for take-off.

Mobilising finance

This just leaves the problem of finance. Will the Ghanaian private sector buy into this big push agenda?

With the government promising catalytic, seed capital of $300 million to $400 million for what is projected to be a US$ 4 billion investment over four years, how will entrepreneurs, often crowded out of financial markets, source these sums to build the infrastructure for transformation to occur?

Encouragingly, a day after the launch, the African Development Bank signed a letter of intent with the 24H+ Secretariat for development of the Volta Economic Corridor.

The announcement of a substantial package from the bank will enable the programme to demonstrate early results and boost investor confidence. If well-resourced, it is not far-fetched to think that the Volta Economic Corridor could drag the rest of the economy behind it. 

Vision of the future

But to turn a net importing country into a net exporter of finished goods, and not raw materials, will need more than good governance and ample finance.

Beyond the measures taken to strengthen the banking sector, entrepreneurs will need faith in a ‘golden future’ ahead. 

By dedicating his “legacy term” to restoring Ghana as the “Black Star of Africa”, President Mahama has already started to paint that future.

His references to the kind of modernisation theory that moved Nkrumah and his mention of the need for Ghana to end “unequal exchange”, a concept of dependency theory, are well-constructed appeals to entrepreneurs to come behind him.

Under Go-24, the programme can draw on Nkrumaist mass mobilisation methods to rally people, labour and resources around the cause.

Once the 24H+ programme demonstrates that it can move beyond rhetoric and once people start to feel the benefits of accelerated development in their pockets, designing scrupulously transparent mechanisms for mobilising voluntary funds for development should not be beyond us.

The author is a journalist and economic historian specialising in economic development