What’s Our Aim?

A young man agreed to buy pizza for a female friend. When they arrived at the pizza parlor, upon hearing the price of the pizza, the young man said, “No, I have changed my mind. I am not buying you the pizza anymore. The price of this pizza will buy three cement bags.” This young man, who was building a home the way we build in Ghana, was buying bags of cement at the time to construct a home. The price of a cement bag had become the unit by which he measured his wealth and expenses. He is likely to do well!

Ghana will not become a country providing jobs for its teeming youth and developing the productive base that will buoy its economy and currency if we continue to count our hard currency earnings in terms of how many months of imports it allows us. The fact that Ghana’s foreign exchange reserves were down to less than three months of imports was widely reported. It stung that we continued to count our wealth in terms of how many imports it affords us, known as Import Cover, while we continue to lament the need to produce, stabilize the Ghana Cedi, and grow businesses that will employ our young people. Why are we, like the young man, not measuring our money in terms of what we intend to achieve with it? What is our aim? Is it to be an importing country or a producing one?

“The British military teaches that an unambiguous aim is the keystone of successful military operations. Selection and maintenance of the aim is regarded as the master principle of war. The Russian Armed Forces’ doctrine calls this principle Steadfastness. Subordinate commanders are to carry out the mission in the spirit and the letter of the plan. The American military calls this principle Objective. They are taught to direct every military operation toward a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective.”

The selection of an aim and the maintenance of the same is the number one principle of war. “The British military teaches that an unambiguous aim is the keystone of successful military operations. Selection and maintenance of the aim is regarded as the master principle of war. The Russian Armed Forces’ doctrine calls this principle Steadfastness. Subordinate commanders are to carry out the mission in the spirit and the letter of the plan. The American military calls this principle Objective. They are taught to direct every military operation toward a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective.”

If Ghana is to win its war against poverty and underdevelopment – and it is a real war we have on our hands – we will need to select and maintain different aims. Our aims should clearly be driven by the outcomes we desire. If we want to create jobs, can we show some creativity and popularize metrics for employment? Why don’t we have metrics for chickens produced or graduates employed, just as we have for import cover?

Yes, I understand that economic orthodoxy has ways to measure all sorts of things. These western standards may have been valuable when their economies were developing. However, many of them do not work well even in the economies they were developed for. There is a substantial school of thought against the continued use of GDP to measure economic growth in many countries.

It serves the needs of Bretton Woods institutions and their biggest shareholders to know how much import cover we have. Their businesses can determine how much more we can buy from them. It is a metric whose consequences do not serve the advertised aim of defeating poverty and underdevelopment. Or is that our aim?

The author is the General Secretary of the Ghana Bishops Conference