1. All of this week, one question has stayed with me.
2. Is it possible to have an honest, calm conversation about the costs and losses associated with the Gold-for-Reserves programme, without dishonest propaganda on one hand and without regressive claims of witch-hunting, on the other?
3. I think the Ghanaian taxpayer deserves that much.
4. This is where Government, in my view, has not helped itself.
5. From the very beginning, there should have been a frank discussion about what it will cost us to centralise gold trading, despite the obvious benefits. The upfront inefficiencies. The implementation expenses. The risks. The trade-offs.
6. Yes! This information should have been upfront. Not after the fact, not in fragments, but upfront so no one is taken by surprise.
7. Good policy does not mean cost-free policy. Adults understand that.
8. So What we were owed was transparency, a clear roadmap, and consistent public reporting. GoldBod is required by law to publish quarterly reports on time. It did not comply.
9. The Bill itself was rushed through parliament without discussion. This is where the Government first failed. Failure to be on the front foot, walking Ghanaians through the programme step by step: what is working, what is expensive, what is being fixed, and what success should realistically look like over time.
10. Instead, the dominant message was that we are witnessing a miracle. That we are in front of the greatest genuis strole there ever is.
11. That is never a healthy way to communicate public policy. So colour me shocked when we woke up to see a flurrry of reactive press statements trying to explain away the IMF disclosure.
13. It is deeply unfortunate that many Ghanaians first learnt about the scale of the programme’s costs from an IMF document rather than from their own Government. That is just bad optics. Plain and simple.
14. Even worse, it mirrors a pattern we have seen before. Consistently when Mampam’s government was borrowing off the books and disguising the true reality of our bankruptcy.
15. And yes, I am still troubled by how our governments appear more accountable to external institutions than to the very people who fund the state. We should not be second-hand consumers of information about how our own country is run. That is unacceptable. And yes, it is deeply colonial.
16. For me, the biggest loss in this whole GoldBod–BoG saga is trust charley!
17. Trust that Government will speak to us citizens honestly. Trust that complexity will not be hidden behind slogans. Trust that we will be treated as adults, not cheerleaders.
18. If this administration is serious about “resetting”, then it must not make it harder for Ghanaians to trust Government. Resetting begins with candour.
19. We are not children. Talk to us. Carry us along. Remember who you are first accountable to. News flash, it is not the IMF!
20. You are not the first Government the IMF has “brought down.”
A word to the wise.
Shalom.
