Global CEO of The HuD Group and bestselling author, Dr Yaw Perbi, has described Ghana as a ‘mad’ person.
This was during a presentation on the topic ‘Officially broke and certifiably mad’, in which he stressed on the folly of governments and individuals in the country.
According to him, the repetitive resort to IMF classifies the country as a “mad person”, adding that the approach yields the same results every time.
“Why, are we mad? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, most famously attributed to Albert Einstein and to other individuals and groups.
“There is no substantive evidence that Einstein wrote or spoke that statement but while we cannot agree on who formed that definition of madness, we can agree that the diagnosis is sound. Seventeen times to just the IMF between 1966 and 2022, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, dare we say we are not mad?” he asked.
Dr Perbi also said, “the insatiable appetite for debt; domestic and external loans have been our undoing”. He stated that the country has been living more on past glories than current exploits.
According to him, people are “too easily satisfied with minimal public progress,” hence anyone who perceives that the country is “doing well” is part of the problem.
Dr Perbi added that although the country may seem “less mad” compared to “our other African siblings,” there has been minimal progress, saying “it certainly doesn’t cure us.”
The Ghanaian economy has had to be supported through repetitive International Monetary Fund (IMF) programmes with the first instance dating as far back as 1966 after the then President, the late Dr Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown.
Although known for cocoa production, gold and at a point oil, the country has been faced with persistent economic and fiscal challenges.
Having promised never to pursue any IMF programme, the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, in the last quarter of 2022 announced that the government needed the programme as it faced inflation hikes and depreciation which had sparked public unrest.
Currently, the country has reached a Staff-level agreement in the IMF deal. This would be the country’s seventeenth time going to the IMF.
Meanwhile, the government has been tasked to ensure the success of some domestic measures in order to warrant the completion of the deal.
Dr Perbi proposed that the leaders change the course of affairs by changing the country’s constitution and duopoly system.
He said voting for the two major political parties; NPP and NDC have yielded the same results.
