ECONOMY NOT GIG FOR EXPERTS By: Abena Osegu Boateng

Read Time: 4 minutes

Discussions of the state of the national economy have often been couched in language very few understand and they are rendered in terms referred to as scientific by self-declared experts whose competence does not go beyond the erection of models far removed from the reality of the masses.

Indeed nobody can tell or describe the state of the economy better than those who suffer the consequences of the hudinis of academia and self–appointed experts who are buried in irrelevant figures and conjections of averages.

Even some Professors of economics are waking up to the reality that the so-called scientific analysis of the economy, most of the time is nothing more than the hallucinations of a privileged elite far removed from  the reality of most people.

Professor Yanis Varoufakis, himself a former Minister of Finance in Greece and an academic of world repute, admits the failure of classical economists to understand the reality of life and the consequences of Government policy and action allegedly designed to improve the living conditions of people.

He makes the point forcefully in his exciting book “Talking To My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism”.

In the prologue to the book, he writes “As a teacher of economics, I have always believed that if you are not able to explain the economy in a language young people can understand, then quite simply, you are clueless yourself. With time, I recognized something else, a delicious contradiction about my own profession that reinforced this belief: the more scientific our models of the economy become, the less relation they bear to the real, existing economy out there. This is precisely the opposite of what obtains in physics, engineering and the rest of real sciences, where increasingly scientific sophistication throws more and more light on how nature actually works.

“This is why this book is my attempt to do the opposite of popularizing economics: if it succeeds, it should incite its readers to take the economy in their own hands and make them realize that to understand the economy, they also have to understand why self-appointed experts on the economy, the economists are almost always wrong”.

At this time of a noisy and often useless debate on the state of the national economy, Professor Varoufakis offers a useful paradigm for evaluation and urges us to become practitioners of commonsense. To take the economy into our own hands and review it on the basis of our own reality.

They tell us that inflation is the rate at which prices move and they have been insisting that it has been reduced drastically. The reality however is that prices of all goods and services are shooting through the roofs to the high heavens or hell over the last four years.

How do they explain how the price of kenkey has jumped from one Ghana cedi to three Ghana cedis in only four years? How do you make sense out of the fact that a margarine cup of beans is selling at GHC5.00 now when it is sold at GHC1.00 only four years ago? Petrol is now selling for GHC28.00 a gallon when it sold for GHC 16.00 only four years ago.

Perhaps, you may also want to look at the price of an olonka of gari which sold at GHC5.00 only four years ago and is now available at GHC12.00.

What about a bucket of onions which sold at GHC15.00 and now goes for GHC40.00?  And have you looked at the price of bag of maize which has jumped from GHC170.00 to GHC5450.00 in just four years?

Isn’t it interesting that Ghana, a leading producer of gold which used to be the measure of money is experiencing a massive depreciation of its currency? Ghana today is the leading producer of gold in Africa and the 5^th largest producer of gold in the world.

On Monday, November 29, 2021, “The Business Analyst” reported that “with barely five weeks to the end of the year, the Ghana cedi has come under intense pressure and is being classified as among currencies with the “Worse Spot Returns”.

“It is now ranked 14^th among 20 top African currencies tracked by Bloomberg with regards to its performance against the United States dollar”.

We have been told by persons with doctorates from Harvard and Oxford that the Ghanaian economy is doing very well only to be confronted with that fact that Ghana now spends about 128 per cent of her total national revenue on debt-servicing and public sector emoluments. What does all these mean?

How do we explain the fact that Ghana is one of most endowed countries in the world and yet some of its citizens face starvation? Ghana has a lot of gold, it is the second largest producer of cocoa in the world, it has diamond, it has bauxite, it has iron, it has timber and many more. So what is the problem?

Perhaps reference to Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah who was not  an expert on the economy, will reveal that what we need is a fundamental restructuring of the national economy which will place our resources in our own hands and which will ensure that these resources are exploited for our own benefit.

We may want to listen to Yanis Varoufakis and take the economy from air-conditioned rooms and the high heavens of academia and intellectual pomposity to the streets of popular understanding and actions.

This is only when the economy can and will make sense.