There is a certain irony in Ghana’s economic story — an irony that hums beneath the sound of printing presses and the whisper of rustling dollars. The Bank of Ghana, in its anxious bid to steady the cedi, often behaves like a physician who soothes a fever without curing the infection. Each injection of foreign currency into the veins of the market cools the patient momentarily, yet the sickness — the deep structural fragility of our economy — remains untouched, pulsing quietly beneath the surface.
We have become a nation living on borrowed breath. Our economy inhales imports and exhales dependency. The industrial base, weak and weary, can scarcely support the weight of our consumption. Our exports, modest and often raw, tell a story of a country that sells its inheritance for daily bread. And so, when the cedi trembles, the central bank reaches for the dollar like a desperate man clutching a cane that cannot bear his weight. It steadies him, yes — but only until the next stumble.
But what makes this tragedy even more profound is the silence of conscience that accompanies it. For while the Bank of Ghana plays its monetary games in Accra’s high towers, the rivers in the hinterlands bleed brown with mercury. Galamsey — illegal mining — has become both a symptom and a sanctuary of our national short-sightedness. In the same way that the BoG treats currency weakness with temporary infusions, the government treats the galamsey crisis with speeches, committees, and camera-ready raids. The result is always the same: a brief applause, a fading echo, and the miners return at dusk to the same rivers, their pans glinting like quiet rebellion against neglect.
One might almost believe that our leaders have made a silent pact with the chaos — for the gold that poisons our rivers also feeds our foreign reserves. Every ounce of it, though smuggled and soaked in silt, becomes part of the illusion that the economy breathes fine. Thus, in the name of foreign exchange, we have exchanged our forests for scars and our rivers for ruin.
The BoG’s policy and the government’s tolerance of galamsey are not separate failures; they are twin threads in the same tapestry of expedience. Both are rooted in the same refusal to build — to till the soil of production, to nurture the small industry, to dream beyond the next balance sheet. We choose the spectacle of stability over its substance. We chase the dollar while our own resources drown beneath our feet.
And yet, there is still time to turn. The cedi will not find peace in the vaults of foreign banks but in the quiet hum of Ghanaian factories; in the cocoa that is processed here, not shipped raw; in the minerals refined, not smuggled; in the rivers restored, not ruined. When the BoG learns to anchor policy in productivity, and when the government learns that environmental protection is economic policy, then perhaps the cedi will no longer need artificial resuscitation.
Until then, Ghana remains a country balancing between the glitter of the dollar and the grime of galamsey — a nation with its eyes on the market, and its feet sinking slowly in the mud.
