Mat Whatley, writing for The Telegraph, has done what too many British columnists do when their nostalgia outpaces their knowledge. He mistakes sovereignty for socialism and democracy for defiance. With the composure of a missionary who never read the Bible, he calls Ghana’s elected government “Leftist” and “Russia-sympathising,” as if Black independence still needs an imperial label to make sense.
He begins his sermon with borrowed numbers and ends with borrowed thinking. To Whatley, Britain’s decision to restructure Ghana’s $256 million debt is charity. It is not. It is a contractual adjustment under the same multilateral frameworks that Britain itself benefits from when the pound trembles. According to Ghana’s Ministry of Finance and the UK’s Export Finance reports, the agreement extends repayment by 15 years and unlocks stalled infrastructure projects under UKEF-backed financing, not as a gift, but as a trade facilitation mechanism consistent with IMF and Paris Club restructuring norms. Yet he writes as though London were tossing coins to a beggar nation. The arrogance is exhausting.
John Dramani Mahama, the president he calls a “Soviet sympathiser,” studied in Moscow three decades ago. That is his crime? By Whatley’s logic, everyone who ever studied in Oxford is a monarchist. Ghana’s foreign policy is not an act of ideology; it is the discipline of survival, the skill to navigate a world where the cowboys of the West lecture about democracy while Gaza bleeds.
Then comes the sanctimonious dirge about the judiciary. He claims that our former Chief Justice, Gertrude Torkornoo, was “dismissed based on a secret petition.” False. She was lawfully removed under Article 146 of our Constitution after a transparent process involving the President, the Council of State, and a five-member committee to investigate petitions against the Chief Justice of Ghana. There is no lawfare here. The law is the law. Whatley and his handlers know this. They only want to create the illusion that Ghana is a place where opponents cannot get a fair trial. It is the oldest trick in imperial propaganda, weaponising suspicion to weaken sovereignty.
And yet, through eight horrendous years of corruption, arrogance, incompetence, and reckless mismanagement under the previous administration, years that saw Ghana’s economy bleed, citizens taxed to death, and the nation humiliated before the IMF, we never saw a Whatley opinion piece. Not one righteous outburst from London about nepotism, crony capitalism, or the political arrogance that crushed livelihoods. Silence then; outrage now. That is not journalism. It is choreography.
But Whatley’s heart bleeds for Ken Ofori-Atta, the fugitive finance minister he paints as a saintly reformer. Ghana remembers him differently. Under his stewardship, public debt tripled from GH¢122 billion to over GH¢600 billion, banks collapsed, pensions evaporated, and the nation crawled to the IMF for a US$3 billion bailout. He was not prosecuted for being “Western.” He was investigated for being reckless. The Office of the Special Prosecutor publicly confirmed that a provisional arrest and extradition request had been submitted through the Attorney-General, and that an INTERPOL Red Notice had been issued. These are not inventions; they are verifiable filings documented in official communiqués and international law enforcement bulletins. To call that persecution is to insult every Ghanaian who queued for bread while he traded Eurobonds like family heirlooms.
Whatley pretends to care about the rule of law, yet he is silent on Britain’s own crises, a monarchy still exempt from taxation, a parliament scarred by lobbying scandals, and a political class that sold Brexit to the poor and London to the oligarchs. If Ghana had done half of that, he would have called it tribalism.
Ghana owes Britain nothing but honesty, and honesty demands this: the British Empire is gone, but its mouthpieces remain, journalists who arrive late to the conversation and expect applause for mispronouncing the truth. Whatley’s article is not a critique; it is a colonial tantrum masquerading as commentary. It reeks of the same moral superiority that once called looting “civilisation.”
What rented voices like Whatley will never understand is that Ghana is not a “bad port of call.” It is a sovereign democracy rediscovering its moral compass after years of economic vandalism disguised as capitalism. Britain’s re-engagement with the world will not work through insult. If Whatley wants to write about decay, he should start with the scaffolds that still cling to Big Ben.
He calls Ghana’s leadership socialist. I call it a survivor of hypocrisy. And as Chinua Achebe warned in Things Fall Apart, “our own men and our sons have joined the ranks of the stranger.” Whatley merely confirms it, only this time, the stranger wears a British tie and speaks in borrowed indignation.
If the question is who will be the cat to bell this Telegraph propagandist, then here I am, claws sharpened by history, spine straightened by truth.
Kay Codjoe
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