Ghana’s Economy is Among the Worst

Despite its stability and resources Ghana is quite inefficient. I wonder if the government got out of the native businessmen’s way would it be better? I am almost sure it would be.  I imagine the good people at The Danquah Institute agree.

The http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/08/zimbabwe-ghana-congo-nicaragua-business-worst-economies.html

Ghana has the world’s largest manmade lake and the 1-gigawatt Aksombo Hydroelectric Plant, built to supply electricity to Africa’s largest aluminum smelter. But the smelter has been idle since 2009, a casualty of low aluminum prices and persistent electricity shortages that have forced the government to divert the power elsewhere.

Ghana is a typical example of the world’s worst-managed economies: It’s a country that shouldn’t be poor, but it is. The West African nation’s gross domestic product per capita fell 9% last year to $621, ranking it 154th out of 184 countries tracked by the International Monetary Fund, below resource-impoverished Haiti. With a $3 billion trade deficit last year and $4.9 billion in external debt, Ghana is struggling to pay its bills even as it sits on some of the world’s biggest reserves of gold and bauxite, as well as considerable amounts of offshore oil, which is being developed by Anadarko Petroleum ( APC – news – people ) and others.

“Ghana’s problems are mostly homegrown,” said Peter Allum, the IMF’s mission chief to Ghana, in February. Forbes ranks Ghana ninth on our list of the world’s worst economies.

52 Books by May 15 2010. Anyone Up for It?

I have fallen severely behind in my reading and in the spirit of self improvement, I decided to try to read 52 books in a year, that’s roughly a book a week. I contemplated creating my own unique list but decided to fall back on a template provided by Susan Wise Bauer. Susan wrote The Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had. It is similar to Mortimer J. Alder’s How to Read and it is an OK book if you are into this sort of stuff.  She gives rather long list from each genre spanning the 1600s to the 1900s. Instead of reading every book she assigns for each genre.  I decided to break these genres into fives for the fist twenty five books.  The genres include Fiction(novels), Autobiography and Memoir, History, Drama(plays) and Poets and their poems. First we will start with fiction and the fist fiction book shall be Don Quixote. Don Quixote will be followed by Pilgrims Paradise, Gulliver’s Travels, Pride and Prejudice, and Oliver Twist.

Hopefully I can get a few suckers people to join me in this journey towards literacy.

Monk

Though not a one name only superstar like Madonna. Thelonious Monk deserves celebrity greater than Madonna, somewhere on par with Jesus might be adequate, though some may scoff that I undershot the pianist’s  rank. Brother Monk was a vituouso on the piano . If he isn’t celebrated for incorporating older negro musical styles like the stride piano and Blues into the the hard bop lexicon he is admired for simply being one of the greatest musicians ever. He was also among the most stylish, and as with his music you’d dig whatever Thelonious wore, and he knew you would-simply because he said so. So instead of cataloging his achievements and outfits,  I’ll let his music and some photos do the talking.