The announcement last Friday by President John Mahama that our delegation to the International Monetary Fund negotiations starting September 16, 2014, would be led by Professor Kwesi Botchway has received the usual reaction from the usual quarters.
It has become the habit of some of our countrymen and women to question the propriety of everything done in the public and private spheres by our government, not in furtherance of a genuine desire to appreciate and understand the thinking that goes into decision-making, but rather to sow doubt, interrogate motives, and propagate the inconsequential as the meat of public policy. It is not as if the good old professor is unqualified to lead such an effort on behalf of the government.
Prof. Botchway is so well-known in the planning, direction, and implementation of economic policymaking in this country that it would not be wrong to assert that in so many respects, he has been the most influential, and certainly, the longest-serving Finance Minister this country has ever known since 1951.
He is currently the chairman of the Ghana Gas Company and was recently named by the President to succeed the late PV Obeng as the chairman of the National Development Planning Commission.
Indeed, I have devoted a column to his lecture at Central University last June as my reaction to his graceful lecture on the economy. That lecture itself was his riposte to an earlier one by Dr Mahamadu Bawumia, the NPP vice-presidential candidate for the 2008 and 2012 elections.
My readers will recall that I had taken note of the Bawumia lecture in an earlier column, and had challenged the Central University then to provide Ghanaians with a balanced view of the nature of the state of the economy by inviting a representative of the government to reply Dr Bawumia.
As I noted in my earlier piece on Professor Botchway, he did not differ much from the Bawumia analysis, and deserved rather to be congratulated for his graciousness in agreeing with the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana.
Of course, nothing of the sort happened, as he was rather flailed because he dared to agree with a view that was congenial to the friends and admirers of Dr Bawumia.
Attacks
The appointment of Prof. Botchway to lead our delegation to the IMF has come under attack, from the same suspects once again, as evidence of the readiness of our government to overturn the conventional practice of finance ministers leading such negotiations on behalf of government.
I take a completely different and positive view of the employment by our President of Prof. Botchway in this manner. You cannot acknowledge the depth of knowledge, institutional memory and experience of a person who is also a member of the ruling party, and seek to constrain the President by criticising his choice.
It is written nowhere that delegations of this nature must be led by the Finance Minister. The Vice President, an acknowledged economist, university teacher, banker and public policy wonk, could as well have been chosen to lead because he is also eminently so qualified.
It would appear from where I am standing that the wealth and well of experience from which the President is drawing to assist him in shouldering his responsibilities may be the source of this curious criticism of the choice of Prof. Botchway.
How many of us remember that Prime Minister Busia relieved his finance minister of the additional portfolio of Economic Planning because the latter opposed the quantum of the ill-fated 44 per cent devaluation of the cedi that led to the coup of January 13, 1972, and that the same person became senior minister under President Kufuor over three decades later?
What exactly was the senior minister’s role in government? In fact, Professor Busia added the hived-off portfolio to his duties as Prime Minister.
Governing style
Of course, the appointing powers of any President reflect his governing style, and the political effects of any appointment. President Franklin Roosevelt returned the retired General Douglass MacArthur to active service in the Far Eastern theatre during the Second World War with very happy results for the triumph of American arms over the Japanese.
I am persuaded that the broad, long term and catholic view of the economy that is obviously encapsulated in the appointment of the chairman of the NDPC and Ghana Gas, plus his unrivalled experience as our longest-serving finance minister, strengthens the hand of Ghana in our dealings with an institution where the record of the appointee itself forms part of the solid history of the engagement of the IMF with its client nations in the past three or so decades.
It is a fact the doctoral dissertation of Dr Bawumia himself was on the seminal Economic Recovery Programme and related policies in PNDC Ghana and our relations with international finance institutions, and I must add very quickly, that he so fulsomely praised in his thesis.
That testimony alone, by the foremost spokesperson of the NPP on the economy, must commend the choice of the President to all of us who claim to care about our economy.
Correction
Last week in my column, I committed a serious sin of etiquette which has since been brought to my notice. I wrongly claimed that the incoming Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church, Ghana, the Rt. Rev. Titus Pratt, is the first son of the manse to be so elected into that office.
This was not factual. It is true that he is the first son of a head of the church since it gained autonomy from the British Methodist Church in 1961, to be elected to occupy the position his father occupied, but he is not the first son of the manse in the history of the church in Ghana to head the church.
The first Ghanaian head of the church before the 1961 autonomy, the Rev. Gaddiel Robert Acquaah, was the son of the Rev. Robert Acquaah. Rev. Gaddiel Acquaah was therefore the first indigenous Chairman of the then Gold Coast District of the church from 1950 to 1954 when he died in office.
After autonomy in 1961, the 7th President of the Conference of Methodist Church was the late Rev. Prof. Kwesi Dickson [in office from 1990 to 1997], who also was the son of the Rev. Albert Benjamin Dickson who died in 1948.
