Measuring proclamations of African leaders’ so-called achievements with numbers: The case of Ghana.

By Edward Chisanga

We listen to political proclamations of African leaders about their so-called economic, social and political achievements. We record them and make assessments against statistics to find variances and later, either confirm or point out disharmonies and leave outcomes to the people to make judgement. In this article, we focus on economic achievements. This time, we followed Ghana and its immediate former Head of State, President Akufo – Addo who stepped down last year after finishing his full two terms of office.

HIS ACHIEVEMENT PROCLAMATIONS
• “I’m proud of my achievements as president.”
• Highlighting his administration’s significant achievements,
• He emphasized the transformative impact of his policies on Ghana’s socio-economic landscape.
• One of the hallmarks of his administration, according to Akufo-Addo, is the substantial progress in economic growth and stability.”
• Ghana has played a pivotal role in diversifying the economy, thereby reducing Ghana’s dependence on cocoa and gold exports.”
That’s what former president of Ghana, Akufo-Addo says, and wants Ghanaians, Africans and the world to hear. Yes, former president Akufo-Addo strongly believes that among other things, he must be remembered by the so-called achievements manifested in his vainglorious proclamations, that only he and his courtiers saw.
He’s not alone. Many other African presidents share the same inflated sense of value. So, President Addo may have left his presidency and living his post-presidency with extreme gayety, thinking the people he left behind too, were and believed him. They did not. Not all Ghanaians are moronic or disrelish to numbers. For some, their life is in them. Using numbers, they, together with us tracked this performance, using key words, phrases or sentences in his statements.

Transformative

We began with the term, ‘Transformative,’ and found that it means, “Causing a major change to something or someone, especially in a way that makes it or them better.”
Remember, many African Heads of State use this term, often incorrectly. According to Ghanaians, most families continue to eat less than three meals a day. In July 2023, a World Bank Ghana economic update report stated, “The World Bank says some 850, 000 were pushed into poverty in 2022 because of rising prices of goods and services. The inflationary pressures, the Bank said, had led to a deterioration in living standards and ultimately, worsened and food insecurity among Ghanaian households.”

We can look for more information to show that Mr. Addo’s proclamation was nothing but mockery to most Ghanaians. Akufo-Addo served as President from 2017 – 2025.

Substantial progress in economic growth and stability
We used Unctadstat statistics to assess economic performance of Ghana using the period 2017 – 2025, when he was in charge. Our finding is self-explanatory in Figure 1 shown below. When he took office in 2017, you can see that GDP growth stood at 8 per cent but faced an episode of drastic contraction going below 1 per cent in 2020. Although improvement in growth can be seen thereafter, the period 2021-2023 experienced sharp contraction going to less than 3 per cent. That’s not ‘substantial progress in economic growth and stability,’ is it? I don’t have data for the period 2023-2024 when he left office. But surely, one year would not have made a significant difference from his past trend of dwindling growths.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is an important input to the ongoing economy’s development agenda of a country. It flourishes under a robust local private sector that can partner it. Unfortunately, many African countries like Ghana are failing to attract robust FDI. For President Addo, he began well with inward FDI of about $3.5 billion when he took over office.

He even managed to raise it to close to $4.0 billion the following year. However, since then, FDI began to plummet, even down to less than $1.5 billion in 2023. I doubt if he may have made substantial increase in his last year of 2024 as I have no data. That’s not substantial progress in economic growth and stability, is it?

Ghana has played a pivotal role in diversifying the economy

Well, there’s several ways to measure diversification of the economy. One way is to use the indicator of proportion of exports of manufactured goods to the world in total. In other words, we found Ghana’s total exports of all goods products to the world. Out of this, we measured the share of exports of manufactured goods in that total.
Our finding is seen in Figure 3 below, where we clearly note that the share of exports of manufactured goods shown in the last line if far less than the line above. Share of manufactured goods is less than or exactly 10 per cent compared with about 90 per cent for primary commodities. Does this confirm the statement, “Ghana has played a pivotal role in diversifying the economy? Perhaps diversification is elsewhere.

There’s another way of diversifying. Even without numbers, it may be true that Ghana has diversified its export markets, from the traditional West to China for its minerals. But this diversification has not been matched with export product diversification, like into manufactured goods.

Conclusion

We’re contemplating asking President Trump of the U.S. to extend his model of using the Ovall Office meetings with African leaders, open to the public instead of closed sessions. We’ll encourage him to invite African leaders to the Ovall Office to hold conversations where he can dialogue with them using public broadcast. He’ll ask them tough questions and provide his own answers to their points. This is because in Africa, they don’t give us chance to dialogue with them. They only want us to listen to their stories. If you ask them what they don’t want to hear, they consider you an enemy. They’ll not do that to President Trump.
Mr. Trump, please accept our invitation. After all, you’ve the right to do so because, these African leaders are aid – dependent on your country.