President Mahama’s Golden Calf: The Idol of the Strong Cedi

The idol of a strong cedi inside a weak republic is not progress. It is apostasy. Ghana’s leaders are mistaking monetary illusion for economic salvation. In Mahama’s Ghana, policy theater replaces economic principle — deepening dependency.

President John Mahama and the Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Dr. Anthony Asiama, have both stumbled upon—somewhere in the burning bushes of their vast, Goldbod galamsey terrain—a new idol to parade before their weary people: the Strong Cedi.

Dr. Asiama and his fellow government economists have gathered for the President their clipped British accents, their imported PowerPoint charts, and their borrowed faith in the arithmetic of Empire. From these, the President has melted and molded a Golden Calf—in broad daylight—dispatching his ministers and cronies into a frenzy of trumpeting “macroeconomic stability,” as though the sound of that phrase alone could feed God’s chosen.

Beneath all that glitter, under the tired breath of their technocratic confidence, lies the same old superstition—that doing anything is doing something. That motion is progress. That economic might can be conjured from the heavens by the manipulation of exchange rates rather than by the hard calculus of production, labor, and justice.

The cedi’s so-called appreciation—the Golden Calf itself—is not the fruit of industrial productivity, but the flower of policy theater. In the absence of discipline, the mere act of motion becomes confused with progress. The Bank of Ghana buys dollars to sell cedis; gold exports are centralized; interest rates are kept punishingly high—all to create the illusion of confidence before the IMF and “the markets.”

But who are these markets? And why must Ghana’s dignity be denominated in their currency?

The Strong Cedi is not strength. It is not even conviction. It is, on the right hand, disobedience and indiscipline—and on the left, quiet obedience. It is the posture of a nervous state, kneeling before the ungodly altar of international creditors, murmuring that Ghana is once again safe for their business.

Safe—because the Ghanaian worker will not be paid more.

Safe—because local producers will not compete.

Safe—because the cedi will not cheapen their dollar holdings.

The irony is almost biblical, and cruel. The government praises an appreciating currency even as farmers, traders, and exporters are strangled by it. Exports grow expensive; imports grow cheap; dependency deepens. And yet, they call this progress.

The technocrats will insist, But inflation is falling! Where? At best, some prices of imports are tamed by scarcity, not abundance. Still, the sycophants scream about the competence of their idol. Because the government has squeezed liquidity from its own people while flooding foreign investors with incentives—fattening the Golden Calf—the President’s supporters genuflect at the sound of Dr. Asiama’s trumpet.

For in Ghana, stability has always meant silence. And the silence of the dispossessed is mistaken for confidence.

A nation cannot be built on the brightness of its currency cosmetics. It must be built on production, discipline, and moral seriousness. The “strong cedi” is a false god—a comforting fiction for the political class that cannot tell the difference between exchange-rate optics and genuine prosperity. Until the Ghanaian economy is reorganized to serve the Ghanaian citizen—not the speculator, not the IMF official, not the colonial banker— its so-called strength will remain a mirage shimmering over a desert of poverty.

Every forex infusion, every “stabilization measure,” every IMF hymn is but one more shock of hay for fattening the calf. The story of the Golden Calf is not ancient myth; it is modern economics. And like all who worship illusions of gold, the worshippers will find that their suffering was not redeemed—it was multiplied.