Ghana IMF loan: Will $3bn solve the economic crisis?

Ghana, one of the world’s biggest producers of both gold and cocoa, is suffering its worst economic crisis in a generation, with the price of goods rising at an average of 41% over the past year.

It has just signed a new bailout programme with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) worth $3bn (£2.4bn) over three years to help ease the problems and is expected to receive the first tranche of $600m soon, but how much difference will that make?

Why is the economy in such a mess?

Ghana, long seen as one of Africa’s best run countries, has been struggling to recover from the combined effects of the global Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

President Nana Akufo Addo himself admitted last October that the country was “in crisis” citing “malevolent forces [that] have come together at the same time”.

But the opposition also blames the crisis on what it calls the “gross mismanagement” of the economy - an allegation the government has denied.

The rate at which the price of goods is rising, or inflation, is on a downward path, but it is still very high at 41% and many families are battling to make ends meet.

The size of Ghana’s debt is now almost 90% of the total annual value of its economy. The government had defaulted in the payment of its loans, and it had to restructure its debt with creditors to qualify for the IMF bailout.

The country’s foreign reserves are virtually empty, making it hard to pay for imports which are usually priced in US dollars.

It is in this context that many Ghanaians have been feverishly waiting for this IMF bailout programme.

But this is the 17th time since independence more than six decades ago that Ghana has opted for an IMF programme.

So will the IMF loan make any difference?

Despite being one of the world’s biggest producers of cocoa and the leading producer of gold in Africa, one of Ghana’s basic problems is that it does not earn enough through exports to pay for everything it imports.

This is known as the balance of payments deficit and is partly what the IMF loan is designed to help with. But that is not all.

The programme is also expected to significantly slow the rate of inflation and ensure a stable local currency. All of this will benefit ordinary Ghanaians through stable prices of basic commodities including imported ones.

It has been considered risky to lend money to Ghana, but with the new IMF programme it should mean that the country can borrow again to implement its policies.

But, as the Reuters news agency reports, it may still have to deal with lengthy negotiations with creditors if Zambia’s experience is anything to go by.

Development partners, including the World Bank, have promised to help the country come out of its economic quagmire, while investors are now likely to return without fear of losing their money.

However, if past experience is anything to go by, this cash injection from the IMF will not necessarily solve the country’s long-term economic problems.

Ghana only exited the last IMF programme in 2019 and is already asking for more money.

Analysts have attributed this regular pattern to mismanagement by successive governments over the years.

This new bailout programme is for a maximum period of three years and after

Pastor Mackenzie’s Kenyan cult: The mother who fled Shakahola forest to save her children

Salema Masha speaks softly, but her slender frame is animated by an inner strength that saved the lives of her five children.

One day in March she walked them out of a remote wilderness where followers of a Kenyan televangelist were starving themselves to death in the belief that they could meet Jesus faster.

Among the horrific stories emerging from the Christian doomsday cult in the East African country, Salema’s stands out.

More than 200 bodies have been recovered so far from mass graves in the vast Shakahola forest on the southern coast of Kenya, and more are being dug up every day. Survivors are still being found hiding under trees and bushes in the 800-acre territory.

Self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie opened the Good News International Church in 2003. He repeatedly attracted police attention with his claims that children should not go to school, and that medical treatments should be rejected.

In 2019 he shut down the church and invited his followers to move with him to Shakahola, a place he called a new “Holy Land”.

Salema’s husband was among those who heeded the call.

As she tells her story, she breastfeeds oneyear-old Esther, who was born in the forest. Her eldest, a boy named Amani, is eight.

The mass suicide started in January. Salema says she followed instructions to begin fasting so that she could “get to heaven”.

Mackenzie had been telling his followers for some time that the world was coming to an end. Initially he offered the forest as a sanctuary from the approaching apocalypse. But in a grisly twist it became a last stand to get to heaven before the “End of Days”.

After seven days of fasting, Salema says she heard a voice from God telling her this wasn’t his will and that she still had work to do in the world, so she stopped.

People around her were dying thoughat one point she attended a funeral of eight children. It was called going to “sleep”.

But they said: “If my children won’t die, I should stop attending other peoples’ funerals,” she tells me.

Survivors say children were supposed to be the first to go, according to a macabre order drawn up by Mackenzie. Then the unmarried, the women, the men, and last of all, church leaders.

“When the child cries or asks for food or water, we were told to take a cane and beat them so that they could go and eat in heaven,” Salema explains. “So I thought about it and I said I cannot go on with this situation, I can’t eat while my child is starving. I told myself, if I feel this bad when I fast, how about my child?”

A BBC analysis of Mackenzie’s sermons on video do not show him directly ordering people to stop eating. However, according to Salema, he was explicit in weekly gatherings on Saturdays.

“At first, the pastor dug... water wells [in the forest] and told us to wait for Jesus and we waited. But then, suddenly, he told us we should fast and go to heaven,” she says.

When they questioned the order, as Salema did, they were told that if they delayed their deaths, heaven would be full: “The gate would be closed.”

Much of Mackenzie’s preaching focused on a new Kenyan national identity card that will include personal data encoded in an electronic chip - the “sign of the beast” he called it, to be avoided at all cost.

The cost was very high, and Salema discovered that her husband, one of Mackenzie’s deputies, was involved in managing it. A friend told her that when he went to work, he was actually going to bury the dead.

One day in March he put his foot down, forcing the family to fast. Four days later he left for work and Salema saw her chance. She grabbed the children and left.

“My children fasted for four days without food and water, and they were crying,” she says. “So, when I saw they were so weak, I gave them water and I told myself I couldn’t allow my children to die.”

The children were guided by the steely will of their mother and protected by her status as the wife of a Mackenzie aide.

Salema says she was challenged by other cult members but not stopped, and when she reached the main road after walking for several kilometres, got a lift from “a good

Samaritan” to a safe place.

But other runaways were stopped. A group of male enforcers bearing machetes chased, beat, and dragged them back to the forest, in accounts told by survivors and former cult members.

Mackenzie surrendered to the authorities on 15 April. He denies ordering his followers to starve themselves. But the search and rescue operation found many dead children buried in his compound.

Police told local reporters they had learned from aides who had been detained that this was meant to be a way for Mackenzie to identify with Jesus’ command to “let the little children come unto me,” says journalist Marion Kithi.

Police also said that before Mackenzie left, he ordered his deputies to continue enforcing the mass starvation and burying those who died, according to Kithi. BBC