West Aids Africans : Ghana Now a Showcase for Recovery

Dr. Salome Peprah decided to leave Ghana three years ago after having to treat hundreds of malnourished patients at the nation’s most advanced hospital without so much as a blood pressure gauge, a sterilized needle or a bottle of aspirin.

“All you had were your brains and your hands,” she said. “I wanted to stay, but I couldn’t do much because I didn’t have enough to eat myself.”

Peprah and thousands of Ghanaian professionals left at a time when Accra’s acclaimed university had been closed by a military government; inflation was raging at 150%; store shelves were bare, even of bread, soap and matches; electric power was out every other day; cars were junked for lack of spare parts.

Many Are Coming Back

But now Peprah’s family and many others who left in the dark days of 1983 are coming back to Ghana, lured by one of the most surprising flip-flops on the continent: The left-wing military regime has embraced the economic remedies of Western capitalism.

So far, it seems to be working. Ghana has become the prize student of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, even without giving up its shrill, anti-imperialist rhetoric. Cocoa production is up, the markets of Accra are overflowing with everything from luggage to mascara and the proud people of Ghana are talking with hope again about the future.

“People have got this revival spirit,” said Mark-Anthony Mansour, a 30-year-old Ghanaian businessman who went to Canada in 1982 and came back this year. “We realize that with a little help from the outside, and a little help from the inside, we will get there.”

The change “is so obvious,” said Peprah, who is 30 and the mother of three children. “We have things to work with now. And I have hope that within a few years, things are going to be very good.”

Foreign Projects Abound

The Japanese are building roads just outside of Accra, the West Germans are building bridges, Denmark is laying phone cables and Canada is providing forestry equipment. So many countries are trying to spend so much money on so many projects for Ghana that the government cannot process the paper work fast enough.

World powers that pledged to pump $528 million into Ghana this year have increased the figure to $605 million. Japan promised $51 million in aid this year--and is delivering $83 million. Canada’s $23 million has swelled to $30 million. France raised its ante from $14 million to $20 million, West Germany from $18 million to $21 million, the Netherlands from $7 million to $16 million.

Only the United States has cut its assistance, to $16 million from $23 million. Ghana’s criticism of the United States in the United Nations and elsewhere has increased since the arrest last year of eight people accused of spying for the CIA.

The IMF and World Bank, needing a success story in Africa, have turned Ghana into a showcase for their brand of economic recovery through austerity. World Bank officials hope Ghana will become a model for other ailing countries, breaking ground as it did 30 years ago when it became the first European colony in black Africa to win its independence.

“It’s exciting to be here now,” said the administrator of a Western assistance program. “The Ghanaians are open to solutions and willing to try things.”

It wasn’t always so. Soon after independence, in 1957, Ghana began an inglorious downhill slide. Its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, drained the treasury and was ousted by his own soldiers in 1966. The following years were marked by widespread corruption, four successful coups and a dozen coup attempts.

Economy Hit Low in 1983

By 1983, the country’s economy had hit bottom. The local currency was worth a fraction of its official rate. A severe drought shut down food production. Government price controls, enforced by bulldozers that smashed offenders’ shops, succeeded only in clearing store shelves.

What happened with cocoa, Ghana’s most important foreign exchange earner, illustrates just how far the country had fallen.

In the late 1970s, Ghana was producing more than 400,000 tons of cocoa a year, the largest crop in the world, and the Cocoa Marketing Board had fewer than 20,000 employees. Cocoa production dropped to 160,000 tons in 1983, the marketing board swelled to 105,000 employees and farmers received less than 20% of the selling price of their crops.

Many farmers were smuggling cocoa into neighboring Togo and Ivory Coast. Others simply stopped tending their cocoa trees.

Even the world’s lenders, accustomed to pouring money into the most risky loans on the globe, were not willing to take a chance on Ghana. So the country went in search of help from the East Europeans, whom Ghana’s leaders considered their ideological brethren.

Turned to West for Help

Finding no help there, Ghana turned to the West. In exchange for International Monetary Fund assistance, Ghana agreed to do everything that the Western experts recommended, from devaluing its currency to cutting the government payroll.

Finance Minister Kwesi Botchwey, who considered himself a Marxist, carried Ghana’s case to the IMF. As he later put it: “A revolution that does not make compromises in the face of objective conditions is a blind revolution.”

Flight Lt. Jerry J. Rawlings, 39, the head of state, and his Provisional National Defense Council adopted tough austerity policies, knowing the political risks of asking Ghanaians to make still more sacrifices.

Price controls were removed and the cedi was devalued. Today, after nine devaluations, the exchange rate is 90 cedis to the dollar--in 1983 it was 2.75 to the dollar.

Farmers’ Prices Raised

Ghana eliminated 19,000 employees from the Cocoa Marketing Board, increased prices to farmers and began to improve the roads and ports. Cocoa farmers received about 40% of the selling price this year, twice what it was in 1983. The incentive to smuggle cocoa out of Ghana has almost disappeared.

Analysts marveled at Ghana’s commitment to the recovery program.

“Most other African countries do it halfway,” an economic analyst here said. “This one was so swift, so Draconian . . . a constitutional government could not have done it so swiftly.”

Most Ghanaians say they dislike military governments, yet Rawlings is a popular figure. He has been a cheerleader for the recovery program, and his homilies are posted on green and white signs throughout Accra:

“We Must Eat What We Grow and Grow What We Eat,” “Little Minds Discuss and Gossip About People! Let Us Do Better by Discussing Events and, Better Still, Ideas.”

Still Much to Be Done

The country seems to be feeling better about itself these days, but there is still much to be done. Western experts would like to see many of the 235 state-owned businesses returned to the private sector, and they say the Cocoa Marketing Board is still at least three times larger than it needs to be.

Ghana is seeking outside assistance this year for programs to improve education and rural health care, areas ignored since the economic recovery program began.

On the surface, Ghana remains a sad sight, especially for those who remember it at the time of independence as a land of rich gold and timber reserves and wide beaches, the hope of black Africa.

Accra, the capital, with about a million people, has been ground down by the salt air, the equatorial sun and years of inattention. The skyline is dotted with the girders of tall buildings that have not been completed, reminders of promises not kept. The phones rarely work and the roads are rutted.

The ocean breeze carries the acrid smell of garbage burning on the city beach. Beggars elbow one another for the opportunity to panhandle from passengers in cars stopped at intersections.

Soccer Balls, Jogging Shoes

But in the midst of Accra’s ruins are signs that the city is awakening. Orange soccer balls and imported jogging shoes are on display at one store. Funky Ghanaian music emanating from the “Feeling Vibrations Music Shop” fills a downtown street. Roadside markets offer a selection not seen here in years--jeans and shoes, plastic sandals and silk-like scarves, hubcaps and paint.

Aside from the abundance of goods in the stores, few Ghanaians have seen the tangible evidence of recovery. While salaries have almost doubled in the last two years, most workers are making less, in real terms, because of the devaluations.

Peprah and her husband, a lawyer, need their jobs as well as the proceeds from a small farm to earn the equivalent of $500 a month. They were making more than twice that in Nigeria before they returned to Ghana.

“If you work very hard in Ghana you can do OK now,” the doctor said. “It wasn’t that way before.”

Earns $350 a Month

R.K.G. Assoku, a veterinarian, makes about $350 a month as the head of the University of Ghana’s department of animal science. He is one of the highest paid teachers in the country, but it is a country where a television set, for example, costs $1,000 or more.

Assoku, 46, left Ghana soon after the government temporarily closed the university in 1983. Back then, his salary “wouldn’t even feed my family.”

“I wasn’t going to hang around,” he said. “I just decamped.”

He worked a year in Nigeria, earning roughly 10 times his previous salary, spent a year in Kenya, then returned to Ghana last year.

“The environment here seemed more congenial,” he said in a recent interview at his office on the campus, which is dotted with steeples, tower clocks and white classroom buildings with red tile roofs. “Besides, I had a little money saved and knew that at least for the first two years my family wouldn’t starve.”

Bread Costs Day’s Pay

For the thousands of Ghanaians who are paid the minimum wage of 90 cedis a day (about $1), times are especially difficult. A loaf of bread still costs nearly a day’s pay.

A high-level executive at the Bank of Ghana admits privately that he cannot afford a restaurant meal.

“My family gets three meals a day,” he said. “But we don’t have what one calls a British breakfast, with eggs, cereal and tea.”

Yet, Ghanaians seem to have a special capacity to get by, a trait Westerners here call “Ghana Magic.” A financial expert admits he has “never been able to figure out how people live here on their wages.”

The success of the economic recovery program depends to a large extent on Ghanaian endurance. Another coup would certainly threaten the program. So would a drought. Plentiful rains have produced the current abundance of food.

But Western economic analysts say their biggest worry is that Ghana will lose patience.

“The danger is that they won’t stick with the sensible economic measures,” one analyst said. “Inflation is down, exports are up, and real incomes are rising steadily. But people expect government, through some hocus-pocus, to put them back to the standard of living they had 15 to 20 years ago. That is not going to happen.”