Ghana Requires Drastic Measures To Transform Economy

– Professor Stephen Adei

A renowned Development Economist, Emeritus Professor Stephen Adei, is urging the government to take audacious steps to stimulate growth, particularly in Ghana’s real sectors.

That implies limiting the importation of some products, including rice and fruit juices, while creating an enabling environment for locally processing and manufacturing businesses to thrive.

The real sectors: agriculture, industry and manufacturing are considered the backbone of Ghana’s economy, providing employment, income, and contributing to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Nonetheless, these sectors have suffered fluctuating growth, a situation, Emeritus Prof said required bold steps to be addressed by the government.

“We must take some drastic measures that will make the real economy grow, because if we don’t grow agriculture and our local businesses, we can’t see the transformation that the country needs,” he said.

“We have to see how we’re reduce import, and not all imports across the board. There are certain things that we don’t need in this country. For example, we don’t need to import even one litre of juice,” he added.

He cited Nigeria, where despite its 240 million people, stopped importing rice, saying, “If we stop importing rice and with irrigation and other things, we will have rice produced with the various value chain – plantation, milling, and selling.”

Emphasizing the need for agriculture to receive more investment, he said it was necessary for the government to manage the country’s food systems to prevent any eminent food crisis between now and August to tame inflation.

Doing so, he said, meant that the government developed rural road infrastructure to enable the carting of food produce to market centres by utilising the District Road Improvement Programme (DRIP) initiative introduced by the erstwhile government.

The Development Economist also called for a ban on some categories of vehicles in the country.

“It’s going to be a hard decision but there are certain things we must stop; if we are serious people, we will stop importing certain vehicles. You can’t bring a vehicle into Ghana, which is say, more than 1.8 litres,” Prof Addai.

Regarding revenue generation, Prof asked the government to reduce taxes that people find difficult to pay, and take hard measures about property tax, including sacrificing some times to stop money to all Metropolitan Assemblies so that they would collect those taxes.

He also recommended to the government to ensure a greater collaboration between the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Ghana for effective management of fiscal and monetary policies. “If we do the right things, by the end of the four years, people will see the transformation and nobody will say a government which has brought relief to our lives should be thrown out,” Prof Addai said.