I had an interesting around ‘the kitchen table’ discussion with my mother in law. It was about how to strengthen the Cedi against the major currencies. At the time, I was just an unpretentious pretender trying to prove myself worthy of the hands of one of her wonderful and extremely brilliant daughters Teacher was then in the last stages of an outstanding life long career of duty and mission as a teacher in many of the public schools in Accra. We’ve had many such discussions on varied topics down the years and still do occasionally. On this particular day, her solution was plain, simple and straight to the point. “We have to export more” she said. “The Cedi will continue to weaken until the value of our exports exceeds the value of our imports” She added. One cannot help but agree with her. We need a lot of dollars to fund our imports; the price of the dollar goes up and the cedi weakens. Thinking through today and in light of the recent depreciation of the local currency, it is clear that it should not necessarily take a PhD in Economics to know what we must do as a country. Many years of education and theorizing only succeeds in making us ignore the obvious and go in search of an evasive text book answer to everyday problems many of which are actually practical and based on common sense. Governments do not produce for export. In fact, most of us do not even want government to do this. Their track record at managing anything is stinking and deplorable enough. We must take matters into our own hand and save the cedi. We can achieve this by turning to production whenever we think business and not commerce. Commerce and Service never took any third world country to first world. Some who have achieved this leveraged on the production base of bigger nations nearby. We do not have any such blessing and must sweat it out. The sooner we realize this, the better for mother Ghana. Good evening.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 17:32:56 +0000
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