A former Deputy Finance Minister and Member of Parliament for Obuasi West, Kwaku Kwarteng, has warned that Ghana’s democracy could collapse if the country continues on its current path.
He emphasized that to prevent this imminent danger, the political class must acknowledge this reality and change their behavior immediately, as time is running out.
The Spokesperson on Parliament’s Economy Committee observed that since independence, it has been customary for political parties to boast about their past achievements and make grand promises for the future during elections.
“At the same time, a political party must paint its opponents in the worst possible light. We have mastered this art, and in the process, we have forgotten that politics should be about the future of our children and our motherland. We have reduced election campaigns to bitter struggles between competitors seeking power for the wrong reasons.”
In an opinion piece, Mr Kwarteng also said Ghana’s economy was struggling due to decades of bad politics and economic mismanagement.
“We (NPP) are looking to break-the-eight. It is an expectation coming at a time when hostile external factors have imposed considerable hardship on the average Ghanaian voter. But it is not just external factors that threaten our chances of electoral victory.
“The economic problems Ghana is facing today, at both the national level and in households, are also the cumulative effects of many decades, spanning different governments, of the bad politics and economic mismanagement that have characterised the governance of our country. Since independence, we have survived by constantly overspending our means and borrowing to finance the overspending. And many of these expenditures are just bad prioritisation.
“We always offer higher interest to lenders, borrow more, use a part to repay previous debts, and the rest to pay for the current year’s overspending. So, we have been running our country’s economy like a Ponzi scheme. The economy is struggling today because lenders are now refusing to lend to us. It is just like a Ponzi scheme going into crisis once people stop depositing their monies with them.
