Ghana Tackling the Wrong Economic Priorities – Joe Jackson
The Chief Executive Officer of Dalex Finance, Joe Jackson, has called for a fundamental rethink of how Ghana diagnoses its economic challenges, warning that the country may be “solving the wrong problem.”
Speaking at a public lecture organised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing Ghana (CIMG), Jackson argued that Ghana’s difficulties are less about imports or trade deficits and more about structural inefficiencies that drain value from the economy.
“Ghana’s economic problem is not just policy. It is how we interpret the economy,” he said.
Jackson challenged the widely held belief that the cedi’s weakness is driven primarily by excessive imports, pointing instead to what he described as systemic leakages, including profit repatriation, debt servicing, and payments for technical and management services.
“We don’t have a dollar problem. We have a retention of our export problem,” he stated.
According to him, although Ghana earns significant foreign exchange from exports such as gold and oil, the country retains less than half of that value, limiting the impact on the domestic economy.
He warned that emerging sectors such as lithium and bauxite could follow the same pattern unless deliberate efforts are made to increase local participation and control.
Jackson also questioned the long-standing policy emphasis on small and medium-sized enterprises as the main drivers of growth, arguing that many operate at subsistence levels and lack the scale to transform the economy.
“If launching SME programmes created growth, Ghana should be an economic superpower by now,” he remarked.
Instead, he advocated a more targeted approach focused on building large, high-performing firms capable of competing globally.
“We don’t have a single global champion. Yet we host the champions of other countries,” he said, pointing to the dominance of foreign companies in key sectors of the economy.
He argued that the issue is not foreign participation itself, but Ghana’s failure to develop strong local firms.
“Ownership is about control. Who takes the decisions and where that control resides,” he explained, noting that many companies registered locally are effectively controlled from abroad, resulting in significant financial outflows.
Jackson also criticised the impact of political cycles on business continuity.
“We are eating our young in eight-year cycles,” he said, warning that emerging firms are often weakened with changes in government.
While acknowledging recent policy initiatives such as the proposed Gold Board, he argued that they do not address the deeper structural issues.
“Gold Board is good, but it doesn’t solve the key problem,” he said.
He further cautioned against overemphasising import substitution policies, insisting that financial leakages, not consumption patterns, are the primary source of pressure on the economy.
“It’s not the rice. It’s the billions we lose through repatriation and service contracts,” he stressed.
Despite recent improvements in the cedi’s performance, Jackson warned that the stability may be short-lived if underlying structural challenges are not addressed.
“The problem is structural. As soon as discipline slips, we will be back where we started,” he cautioned.
