My dear Sikaman,
I write this letter not with pen and ink, but with the ink of unpaid bills and the dying light of a rechargeable lamp that travelled from Shenzhen to Dubai to Kantamanto before arriving at my room in time for tonight’s dumsor. Three continents conspired to bring me this small bulb. It costs more than the electricity it replaces. This, my beloved country, is my opening exhibit.
I come to you not as a prophet, not as a critic, not even as a son who is angry. I come as a survivor. Because only a survivor can live on salary in arrears, breathe corruption in stereo, dodge a pothole with one foot and an Okada with the other, and still wake up on a Tuesday morning, dress in a clean shirt, and queue for four hours to renew a passport that will be used, God willing, to leave you. We love you, Ghana. We love you the way one loves a difficult parent — completely, and from a safe distance whenever possible.
Permit me a few observations, gently delivered.
Last Friday, my beloved, you announced that you had exited the IMF. The Presidency declared the successful conclusion of the Extended Credit Facility programme, citing US$14.5 billion in reserves and the restoration of macroeconomic stability. Aweeii. The trumpets sounded across Accra. WhatsApp groups exploded with the green-yellow-red flag emoji. We have broken the eight! We have broken the IMF! Ministers wore their best smiles. The Finance Minister stood at the podium with the calm satisfaction of a man who has finally paid off his cousin.
And then — quietly, in the same press release, almost as a P.S. — it was disclosed that Ghana has simultaneously entered a 36-month “Policy Coordination Instrument” with the same IMF.
Charley. My country. We have left the IMF and joined the IMF. It is the same building, the same staff, the same coffee in the staff room. We have simply changed our membership tier from Premium to Premium Plus. The IMF is no longer our landlord, they have explained kindly; they are now our consultant. The rent is no longer rent; it is technical assistance. The debt is no longer debt; it is a fiscal anchor pegged to a 45 per cent of GDP debt-to-GDP ratio by 2034. The English language, in your service, has worked overtime this week. We should pay it allowance.
This is Ghanaian governance in one breath, my beloved: we do not solve problems, we rename them, and then we hold a press conference to congratulate ourselves on the new name. Dumsor became load management. Load management became system upgrade. Galamsey became artisanal small-scale mining. Unemployment became self-employment opportunities in the digital economy. The cedi falling against the dollar became exchange rate realignment. And now, the IMF is no longer the IMF; it is policy coordination. By next year we shall call it strategic friendship. By 2028 it shall be promoted to spiritual fellowship.
But my dear Sikaman, let me not be unkind. You have your strengths. You have many strengths. Let me list them.
You are the only country in the world where a man can lose his job, his savings, his wife, and his car, all in one quarter, and still by Sunday morning be in church dancing to “I am winning, I am winning, I am winning every day.” This is not denial, my friend. This is a national gift. We metabolise disaster the way other countries metabolise water. Hand a Ghanaian a tragedy and within forty-eight hours we have made a TikTok skit about it, scored 800,000 views, and recovered our dignity in advertising revenue. The American economist will study his data; the Ghanaian will study his lighting and his angles.
You are also the only country where the youth, denied jobs, invented their own economy. Skit makers. Content creators. WhatsApp marketers. Forex YouTubers. Crypto evangelists. Twitter activists. Three of my cousins now make a living describing other people’s living. I do not know whether to be proud or worried, so I am both. Eyaa, if unemployment were a currency, my brother, we would be the richest people in West Africa, and the dollar would be queuing to enter our pockets.
You are rich in faith, my country. Painfully rich. Prayer camps outnumber clinics. We have produced more pastors per square kilometre than any nation in recorded history. The only job in Sikaman that requires no CV, no qualification, no diploma, and no proof of competence, is Man of God. You wake up, you announce a vision, you rent a small space, you order one keyboard, and aweeii — congregation. By Friday you have a Range Rover and a YouTube channel. Meanwhile, the engineer who studied for seven years cannot afford one second-hand Vitz. There is a small distortion in the national reward system, my beloved, and it has been going on for a while.
And let us speak softly about the floods. Yes, the floods. Every June, Accra becomes Venice. Not the romantic Venice of gondolas and Italian coffee — the other Venice, where your shoes drown and your kelewele floats away. And every June, the Honourable Minister appears on TV and announces a task force. The task force shall examine. The task force shall consult. The task force shall produce a report. The report shall be launched. The launch shall have meat pies. By the next June, we shall have a new task force, and the old one shall have quietly relocated to consultancy. Meanwhile, the gutter — the same gutter that has been blocked since 2007 — remains blocked. We are the only nation that has ministerial committees but no shovels.
But let me confess something, my beloved. I do not write this letter to scold you. I write it because I love you, and because love without honesty is what we Ghanaians call “long throat” — appetite without nourishment. I love your jollof. I love your highlife. I love that you can move from English to Twi to Ga to Pidgin in one sentence without a passport. I love that even in your worst week, somebody is somewhere laughing at a joke you yourself invented. I love that your mothers can run a household, a business, a church, and a small village simultaneously, all before the sun comes up. I love that the trotro mate has memorised more geography than the Minister of Roads.
But, Sikaman, my Ghana — let us be small-small honest with ourselves. We are not finished. We are not failed. We are confused. Confused in a particular Sikaman way that only we understand. We borrow money to repay borrowed money and call it sovereignty. We celebrate exiting programmes by entering the same programmes through the side door. We promise to end dumsor and reward ECG with a new name. We import tomatoes from Burkina Faso while our farmers cannot find a market for their own. We send our brightest abroad on government scholarships and then complain about brain drain when they refuse to come back to a country where their salary cannot buy them one tin of milo.
The medicine for confusion is not slogans. It is not customised white shirts at rallies. It is not another committee with a creative acronym. It is, my dear Ghana — and I say this as your faithful son — sense. Plain, unbranded, unsubsidised sense. The kind that the kelewele woman at the junction uses to balance her ledger every evening, without IMF support and without quarterly press releases.
Until you find it, my beloved, I shall remain at my post. I shall pay my taxes (when I can). I shall queue at the bank (when the system is up). I shall charge my phone at the junction (when ECG is in a generous mood). I shall vote (when I can find my polling station). And I shall write these small notes, in the dark, by the dying light of a Chinese lamp that travelled three continents to keep me honest.
I love you, Ghana. I love you the way one loves a stubborn river — with one eye on the beauty and one eye on the flood.
Yours in eternal hope and unpaid taxes, Kwabena Kokote Citizen of the Republic · President of the Association of the Disillusioned but Not Yet Departed · Paid-up Member of Group B
P.S. — My beloved, please tell the Honourable Minister of Finance that I read the announcement carefully. We have not exited the IMF. We have only moved to the back room. The drinks are still being served. The bill, as ever, is on us.