So how do you explain the cedi crisis to a disinterested, non-business ordinary joe?

If his excuse is that he is too brain-dead to understand all the technicalities, surely he can’t make another excuse that his heart, his feelings are dead too, can he?

So let’s rummage through this boring minefield of jargons by telling a love story about the cedi.

 

Does this story strike a cord?

So this bored teenager stands and peers over her wall late afternoon. She can’t step out unless her mum sends her. She isn’t allowed to talk to guys or visit anybody who has a male in his house – including grandfathers.

These are instructions from a suspicious, strict dad, over-zealous to protect his 18 year old investment from hot-blooded merciless guys in the neighborhood.

Until one day this guy walks up to her by the wall and steals her heart – hopelessly.

This dad now closes from work rushing home to hide by the wall hoping to catch the guy he calls a bastard. He would call his wife from the office to check if Dede is inside her room. And he has trained the dog to smell the scent of the bastard 375 meteres from home – and a customized bark to announce impending danger.

Yet despite all his award-winning efforts, Dede runs through the hall one week-end, dashes into the bathroom and throws up violently – yuck. Her disgusted Dad looks at her mum with the shock of hearing the last trumpet -it’s actually Gayoyo who manages to nail his target – in a record two weeks.

This was even without the benefit of social media and an android phone – otherwise the chase would be over within the same time Jesus Christ spent underworld – three days.

 

Our Cedi is in love too

Ghana cedi has fallen – fallen hopelessly in love with an appreciating dollar. And government is the over-zealous dad setting artificial barricades against a Dede injected with a natural dose of pulsating love.

And social media is a black market that these two love-birds use to circumvent their parent’s reach.

Bottomline is: how do you prevent your daughter too young to fall in love from actually falling in love?

Tough question for any parent.

 

How do you disinfect an economy so much in love with the dollar?

Tough question for any government

Whether the policy instituted by the Bank of Ghana will work or not depends on who gets tired of outsmarting the other.

Businesses/black market or BoG/Economic Mgt Team.

Who gets tired of executing orders vrs who gets exhausted trying to undermine them?

It is a clash of resolve especially when you throw in the fact that most of the BoG regulation have been sitting in our books for the governor’s own admiration every Monday morning.

 

The managers we want, the transformers we need

Yet after all is said and done, we all agree that the cedi crisis goes way beyond forex regulations etc. It is a problem of a weak manufacturing base, a spineless colonial economy and a chronic lack of strategy on how we want to turn out as a nation.

An aspirant for General Secretary of the New Patriotic Party Kwabena Agyapong has in the wake of this crunch observed that the NPP are “better managers of the economy”.

Yeah, the managers we want( whether NPP or NDC) but not the transformers we need.

For the two main parties,if the economy is a dilapidated building, they are essentially recommending that it needs a good coat of painting to make it spick and span.

Forget the election rhetoric about economic transformation, this is the reality of their works and policies while in government. The economy needs painting - according to the two managers.

What they disagree on is whether to use Azar or Deluxe paint.

But in truth, the building actually and really needs to be pulled down and built up from the scratch. That is the work of the transformers we need, not the managers we have.

Henry Ford, yeah the Ford car guy, makes an interesting point about development.

He said "raising things, making things, and earning things are as primitive as human need and yet as modern as anything can be".

He meant that the function of society, is raising things – agriculture, making things – manufacture and earning things – transportation.

If a country cannot do these things for themselves, she cannot even begin to talk about progress – but she could talk about mental slavery – because that's what is really her problem – a neocolonial mindset screwed with bolts of short-sightedness.