The Coordinator of the Third World Network Africa, Dr Yao Graham, says successive governments in Ghana continue to operate the country’s economy on a foundation created in the mid-80s by the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC).

Dr Graham believes Ghana’s economy is in tatters because former Presidents John Kufuor, Professor Evans Atta Mills, John Mahama and Nana Akufo-Addo all failed to depart from the economic template set by the former military dictator, Jerry John Rawlings under the PNDC regime.

“Some of the elements of the debt crisis that we are dealing with, some of the elements of the economic policies are not simply attributable to the NPP. The NPP and the NDC have had a consensus about economic policies, the fight really has been about who will be in power and who will be sitting at the top and helping themselves and their associates.

“What we are implementing today, the foundations were laid by the policy choices of the PNDC. The PNDC’s Jerry Rawlings was the benefactor of the Ghanaian elites, they hate him, but he is their godfather.

“He created this economy with the choices he made in the 80s. Some of us left the government because we saw the drift to the right, the choice of neo-liberalism and where it was likely to lead,” Dr Graham told Bernard Avle on the Point of View on Monday, February 13.

He added that “by the end of the Rawlings period, if you look at the composition, it was no different from any of the preceding military governments. It is precisely because the elites felt comfortable with it.”

Dr Graham further described the government’s gold-for-oil policy as merely a crisis management approach that shouldn’t be celebrated.

According to him, the policy “is just a crisis management approach” which doesn’t deserve “us to dress it up as a profound innovation that somehow some generation of policymakers missed out on.”