The author argues that excessive powers of the executive branch of the Ghanaian government undermine the effectiveness of its institutions. This poses an existential threat to the country’s ability to generate prosperity, security and stability for its people. 

Things are not particularly great in Ghana these days. Public debt as a percentage of GDP hovers close to the dreaded 70% mark, double the Sub-Saharan African average. Global interest rates are at their lowest levels since the days of Babylon, with 30% of global issuance of sovereign bonds yielding negative returns (the equivalent of a bank issuing you a mortgage and turning around and also paying you the interest). However, investors in Ghana’s government bonds (in its local currency) refuse to lend to the government at less than 24% interest rate.

Its GDP grew at 2.5% in the second quarter of this year. In a country which saw its GDP growth rate peak at 19% in the second quarter of 2011 and finished that year with the second fastest growing GDP in the world at 13.5%, current growth figures amount to something akin to an economic depression. Worse, the nation has, at different times in the last few years, had the world’s worst performing currency and the lowest credit rating in Africa. It therefore came as no surprise when it earned the dubious distinction of being grouped as one of the top 10 worst managed economies in the world.

As I mull over what went wrong, five lessons I picked up from playing football in primary school provide useful lessons.

1. Competency

To improve one’s chances of winning, it was imperative to field the best players.

2. Positioning

Putting the right people in their correct positions complemented competency. For example, playing your leading goal scorer in a goalkeeping role was the football equivalent of a unilateral disarmament.

3. Working smartly

If you took care of lessons one and two, your job as the captain or coach becomes less challenging by several orders of magnitude.

4. Politics

This is not to suggest that we did not understand the politics – we most certainly did, such as accommodating the owner of the ball, even if his skills were less-than-optimal. However, this consideration came only after we had selected the most competent players and put them in their correct positions.

5. Incentives

Finally, every player had strong incentives to perform. Those who underperformed risked losing their positions to players, such as the owner of the ball. Those who delivered were likely to garner the attention of the ladies.

These lessons were neither taught in the classroom nor even clearly articulated – we learned by doing. If you didn’t pick them up in the first few games, you were bound to be humiliated until you got your act together. Somehow, we seem to have forgotten these lessons as they apply to the management of our national affairs.

Where did we go wrong? The answer lies in Ghana’s constitution. While the nation is often held up as a model of thriving democracy on the continent, a close study reveals that it exhibits worrying signs of a constitutional dictatorship.

A 2010 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies observes that “even by Africa’s standards, Ghana’s presidency is an extremely powerful institution, dominating the legislature, making more than 4,000 direct appointments (including the chief executives of the 110 district authorities and 30 percent of the members of such authorities).” These excessive powers and the political patronage its confers (power to dole out jobs and contracts) compromises the independence of institutions – and often leads to these positions been stacked with political apparatchiks to do the bidding of the executive branch – which may not always be aligned to the needs of the nation.

A classic example was demonstrated in all its glory in the unbudgeted expenditure witnessed in the run up to the 2012 elections, where weak institutions – parliament and central bank, among others – failed to rein in the spendthrift ways of the executive branch. This saw the nation’s fiscal deficit go from 4% of GDP to 11.8%, just in one year. Worse, these precious funds appeared to have been spent on what a Nigerian politician describes as “stomach infrastructure”, unproductive expenditures such as salaries, subsidies, election giveaways and other patronage networks. This saw civil servants’ salary account for 70% of revenues, with interest payments on a borrowing binge accounting for the bulk of the remainder, leaving very little for productive investments in soft infrastructure (health care and education) and hard infrastructure (roads, power plants), which are the bedrock of long-term sustainable economic growth.

To be fair, both major political parties have been guilty of this dark impulse as has been witnessed in the nation’s fiscal scorecard every four years, since it restored multi-party democracy in 1992.

In football as in economic development, there is only one true path to success – investments in a nation’s soft and hard infrastructure and the institutional framework. Thankfully the major political parties appear to have seen this light as evidenced in their manifestos, which highlight impressive plans for these investments. However, there is very little mention of institutions.

Building institutions is a thankless job. Electorates seldom reward politicians for laying a vision for robust institutions. However, of the different levers we have going into the home stretch of the presidential and parliamentary elections, none offers a surer path to long-term and sustainable prosperity than robust institutions.

The verdict of the politics of personality, identity and filial piety has been declared – it was an unmitigated disaster. The legacies of statesmen who focus on the next generation rather than the next election have stood the test of time. Let’s hope our voters are a little more discerning in December.

 

The author is a social entrepreneur, an opinion writer and a farmer.