About one-third of infrastructure projects in Ghana are never finished
, a black government car pushes through the traffic, past the beggars and street vendors, up a potholed road. Vehicles like these, the perks of a growing number of political appointees, are a common sight in Accra—and a source of popular outrage. Since Nana Akufo-Addo took office as president in January 2017 the number of government ministers has soared by 42% to 125, each with a car, guards and a taxpayer-funded home.
Outside Ghana Mr Akufo-Addo has been hailed as a hero. When he was sworn in, it was as if he was a passenger in a plummeting aeroplane who had just been handed the controls. His predecessor, John Mahama, had taken a high-flying economy—growth was 17% in 2011 thanks to the first production of oil from its Jubilee Field—and promptly put it into a nose-dive.
Yet the praise should be tempered. Some 3.1m people, or about one-tenth of the population, live on less than $1.90 per day, the World Bank’s measure of extreme poverty. It has been a stubborn problem. Although Ghana cut its poverty rate in half in the 20 years to 2013, most of that progress occurred in the 1990s, when it fell by almost two percentage points a year. Since 2006 progress has slowed to about one percentage point per year.
Many of the government’s flagship investment programmes have been sunk by mismanagement. One especially embarrassing example is that of the Komenda Sugar Factory, which was built three years ago with a loan from the Indian government, and which was supposed to provide more than 7,000 jobs. Yet it is idle because it does not have any sugar cane to process. In all about one-third of infrastructure projects in Ghana are never finished.last year has flattered the country’s balance-sheet.
Investors are also wary and demand much higher interest rates to hold Ghana’s foreign-currency bonds compared with Nigeria’s or Kenya’s. One reason is that they worry the government will start spending freely ahead of elections in 2020, as governments often have in the past. Gregory Smith of Renaissance Capital, a bank, points out that budget deficits were almost one percentage point ofhigher in each of the seven election years since 1990 than in non-election years.
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