Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko
In typical Orwellian style, the scandal in London today over the MPs and Ministers allowance claims and in Mills’ Ghana over ex-gratia, 607 cars and plush lands in Accra can be best described as a political culture reminiscent of the Inner Party in the system of “oligarchical collectivism” described in George Orwell’s classic satire, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Writing in the Telegraph of London this weekend, Mathew d’Ancona (Editor of The Spectator) said, the ruling Labour Party promised Britons a new era of fair play, but “Gordon promised so much as custodian of the nation’s ethics. He knew that his authority would never flow from novelty or charm. So, flourishing his moral compass, he pledged a system – governmental and social – based on fair play… fair play, playing by the rules. This mantra has been at the heart of Brown’s political message. And yet his ministers, and even he himself, have made a mockery of that mantra.”
As President Mills and his Foreign Minister were meeting their British counterparts last week, with Alhaji Mumuni holding his palms obediently (like a good African boy before his masters) behind his back, David Miliband was being exposed for claiming £199 for a pram and £80 for “baby essentials”. Gordon Brown had reimbursed his brother, with whom he shares a Westminster apartment (not No. 10 Downing Street), £6,000 a year from state funds for the cleaning of the flat.
Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, British taxpayers did not have to wait (like here) for a change of government to find out how their MPs and Ministers are claiming for every expense from £1.60 for biscuits, lilies, carrier bags, lemon, make-up mirrors, toilet seats, nappies, women’s toiletries and all to £130k in paying mortgages.
For example, Baroness Thornton, a Labour minister in the whips' office, has been claiming £22,000 a year in expenses by saying that her mother's bungalow in Yorkshire (north) is her main home. As a result the peer, who has a £1m house near Hampstead Heath (London), has been able to claim around £130,000 since 2002. Also, Stephen Byers, the former cabinet ¬minister, has claimed £125,000 in expenses for a home which was owned outright by his partner, where he lived rent-free.
The Brits, like us, have grown angrily accustomed to the perception of how senior politicians are milking the system. Their MPs, who get paid between £60,000-£120,000, have selfishly exploited the use of MPs’ allowances to maximise their personal benefit. Indeed, some buy plush homes, through housing and mortgage arrangements supported by the state, have them furnished and refitted by the taxpayer only to sell them for profit and acquire another one to start the exploitation all over again.
Ironically, in the UK today there is talk of the state building homes for MPs whose constituencies are outside of the capital as a way of stopping them from abusing the allowance system which has the state supporting MPs with payments for their second homes in London. The practical check for the Brits in doing what we do here is the sensible recognition that it would be much more expensive to have state houses for MPs than help them own their own homes. So to them state-built homes is a non-starter.
In the view of Alistair Graham, (chairman of the committee on standards in public life from 2004 to 2007), the fundamental problem is that a culture has developed over many years, where there was a strong sense of grievance about backbench MPs' pay being too low, and therefore a culture slowly developed within the House of Commons of saying: “Well, if we can't give you the pay, then we'll do what we can to give you a generous expense system.” Yet, the abuses are not by any means limited to backbenchers.
Grahams points out, nevertheless, that there is a complicit cross-party approach where everyone has agreed it is too difficult to do anything about pay, and instead they have concentrated on improving the allowances.
The situation in the UK is not that different here where Ministers and MPs are also relatively poorly paid. I believe we cannot pretend any longer. While it is understood that MPs poor pay is only reflective of a wider national poor-pay system, we can begin the cure with the MPs and Ministers. And, let us move away from this socialist overhang where the state has to provide everything for its senior staff, from homes, through cars to servants.
MILLS ON BBC
President Mills chose to use his global audience on BBC World last week to defend his decision to go to the IMF/World Bank to “bail us out”. Of course, he was not interested in saying anything that could let investors look this way for fear of giving credit to the NPP, like ‘in spite of the financial difficulties and a huge fiscal deficit, Ghana registered the biggest read GDP growth in Africa in 2008. Our infrastructure has vastly improved.’ In fact, he even distorted the facts about the fiscal deficit by maintaining that it was 15% of GDP.
Kwaku Kwarteng, Communications Director of the NPP, pointed this out on Shamima Muslim’s Saturday breakfast show on Citi FM. The response from Agyenim Boateng, Deputy Information Minister, was that government has since the budget was read seen additional facts and that the revised deficit is now 15% (including divestiture receipts)! I thought that was a sad moment for Ghana. Rather than spinning why the President disingenuously chose to ignore the real fiscal deficit of 11.5%, the Information Minister felt the only way he could defend his boss on that front was to tell a greater lie that the government has now revised the figures and the true picture is that of a 15% deficit. When you have Information Ministers who believe their job is to tell outright lies rather than dabbling in the accepted practice of spin then we have a major problem.
But, I am happy for Ghana if news that the recent Spring Meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington, DC, has earned Ghana about $3.2 billion. About $2.2 billion of the amount is expected to come from the World Bank essentially for budget support programmes, while the remaining $1 billion support from the IMF is to shore up the country's foreign exchange reserves, we are told. What exactly is ‘shoring up foreign exchange reserves’ mean? It is recalled Dr Dufuor, Finance Minister, recently held a press conference, where he lambasted NPP and the central bank for doing just that in the last couple of years after redenomination. Now he goes to Washington only to be told that he will be given $1bn to do the same thing!
POPULIST MILLS
Mills was quick to make an unnecessary populist point on BBC that the expected money was not meant for the pockets of his Ministers or to buy cars but for the people of Ghana. How profound! He was also quick to defend his readiness to paint a negative picture of the economy with the explanation that investors prefer ‘transparency and honesty.’
Well said, Mr President. My only request to you, Mr President, is to extend this ‘new’ culture of transparency to cover the details of the negotiations your government is having with the Bretton Wood institutions. I heard you say on BBC that the two institutions have moved away from the so-called Washington Consensus regime of careless textbook neo-liberal prescriptions and now offer loans and grants on relaxed terms. You are essentially telling us that there are no conditionalities. This point had earlier been volunteered by Kofi Tsikata of the World Bank in Accra, who says that Ghana already has $1bn of unclaimed funds form the Bank. What he failed to mention was why those monies were left unclaimed by the NPP and whether or not the conditions (or paper work completion) that the NPP could not meet to claim the cheap money have significantly changed at the bureaucracy level for the new government to fulfil its part with ease today?
It should be recalled that in the 1982/83 IMF meetings in Toronto and Washington with the PNDC, the talks centred on exchange rate adjustments, monetary and fiscal policy and external debt management. According to the economist Kwame Akonor, the main sticking point then was the issue of devaluing Ghana’s grossly over-valued currency. The IMF wanted immediate and massive devaluation, the PNDC, fearing the political repercussions of devaluation and coup, called for gradual devaluation. The compromise was in the form of the temporary multiple exchange rates system.
When the PNDC announced to the country the transitional, multiple exchange rate for the cedi, it stated, dishonestly that the currency was not being devalued when in fact it had. PNDC member Aanaa Enin said at the time, “The government has not devalued the cedi but had rather readjusted it to meet the economic conditions of the times.” Hmmm.
On April 21, 1983, the PNDC read its first major budget and devalued the cedi by 1000%! It was this budget that launched the Economic Recovery Programme, which was essentially the result of the instructions given to the government from the previous February IMF meeting.
Ghanaians know the (P)NDC to be a group that signals left and turns right, causing confusion and collision to the traffic of national development. In the coming months and years, Ghanaians are likely to see the NDC redefining the workings of Social Democracy, the same way, one suspects, the redefined their Afro-Moses wearing Communism of the 80s. This time around the pressure from the IMF is on reducing the huge fiscal deficit and the slashing of subsidies to utilities and other social interventions. Little is being said about the real and deep causes of our burgeoning balance of payment or trade deficit.
But, who in the NDC has the voice to point out to the IMF and WB that the stimulant packages announced by the Obamas of the developed world speaks directly against the fiscal discipline they are asking us to abide by? Mills was happy to announce to the world that he has subsidised fertiliser by 50% - of course, there was no need to add that he was merely continuing a useful policy of his predecessor, Kufuor. Productive subsidies must be protected like Ghana’s sacred cow. There is wisdom certainly in slashing consumptive subsidies but there is no wisdom in cutting down on infrastructural expenditure. Like how the Great Depression and World War II gave credence to Keynesian economics, the credit crunch has done same, to what I described a couple of years ago as neo-Keynesian economics, a concept behavioural economics will sympathise with. We have been struggling for decades with meagre ‘stimulant packages’.
My suspicion is that President Mills and his Ministers don’t give the impression they are the kind to be expected to do anything radical to stimulating the agenda for a better Ghana. We are likely to see them once again signalling left and turning right, with the hands of the IMF firmly but ostensibly loosely on the steering wheel. T B help us!
The author is the Executive Director of the Accra-based think tank, Danquah Institute.
qanawu@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment