Good news - £256m spent on fixing roads. Bad news - they’re in Ghana

Great news to lighten our darkening winter days! While she’s been ‘fixing the foundations’ of the British economy, Rachel Reeves has found hundreds of millions to spend on building new roads and hospitals. The bad news is… they’re in Ghana.

Britain’s most famous customer complaints rep told us in her pre-Budget speech today “we will all have to contribute” to fixing the mess Labour has made of the economy. But it turns out we’ll be contributing to fix Ghana’s economic mess too.

This west African country – which has been running its own affairs since independence from Britain in 1957 – apparently needs bailing out, and who better to ride to the rescue than the British taxpayer, eh?

Ghana is, I read, “on a promising path to becoming a key player in the global space community”, with 12 new Ghanaian satellites launching before the end of the decade as part of their burgeoning space programme. This has not stopped the British government extending by 15 years (so basically writing off) $256 million we have already lent them – on top of the extra millions for roads and hospitals.

The Ghanaians are very happy with us, with their finance minister Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson calling it “a relief” and have absolutely cross-our-hearts-hope-to-die promised our Labour government that “it is the nation’s hope never to return to this point of debt distress”. They’ve returned to this point 16 times so far since independence.

Of course the Foreign Office would have done all the necessary checks on who we were lending the money to - right?

And they would have no doubt discerned Ghana is fast becoming a socialist dictatorship, where free speech, the rule of law, and indeed an unhindered democratic opposition are all being thrown into question under President John Dramani Mahama.

Mahama is huge fan of Russia. He went to school there, published his memoir My First Coup d’Etat (of course it’s called that), in Russian, and loves to praise “BRICS” - Russia and China’s West-hating economic club – calling it “the power that stands against the Western monopoly” in an exclusive interview with, you guessed it, Russian state media.

One might, perhaps, consider all this a red flag to further British loans.

But the biggest Red Flag of all is the one Mahama keeps flying in the face of Ghana’s democracy. Only days after taking office he ordered the home of a key political opponent Ken Ofori-Atta to be raided by the military and police without a warrant, before securing an Interpol Red Notice and declaring him a fugitive from justice – all the while US-educated Ofori-Atta was in hospital in the States undergoing cancer treatment.

All this sounds serious – and that was the intention – because what Ofori-Atta has been accused of is laughable. Apparently, he should be held personally accountable when he was finance minister in a previous government for every payment signed off by officials made by other government departments. Our own Rachel-from-accounts should be held accountable for lots of things, but signing off civil servants’ expenses in the Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Food probably isn’t one of them. Yet this is the level of the stupidity of the accusations Mahama’s leftist government is making against Ofori-Atta.

As for the Interpol arrest warrant the rules are clear: that needed charges to have been brought against Ofori-Atta before it was issued. But no charges exist.

It all stinks of that depressingly familiar trope of African state corruption - if Ofori-Atta is taken down then his centre-right New Patriotic Party opposition will basically collapse too, leaving John Mahama and his leftist party the National Democratic Congress unopposed. To help this along, Mahama has had criminal charges dropped against a dozen of his own placemen.

But, to get back to the point, you are paying these guys £256m of your money to “fix the roads”. Possibly.

Why? I mean just why?

Weirdly there are parallels between Mahama and our very own Labour Party.

Like Starmer, Mahama spends money he hasn’t got on ill-conceived projects which Ghana does not need and which add nothing to the lives of ordinary people.

It is interesting too that, despite the veneer of centrism Starmer likes to peddle, both the Labour Party and Ghana’s NDC are members of the international Progressive Alliance - a sort of 21st century version of the old Leninist Comintern - along with such redoubtable bedfellows as the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Mauritian Militant Movement.

Make of that what you will.

But to get back to the point - why, as Britain faces one of the toughest economic eras since the war, are we doling out cash to other countries fully capable of standing on their own two feet?

This is not Ethiopia in the middle of a devastating famine, this is a grown-up country with a space programme.

If anything they should surely be bunging us £256m to sort our roads out.

If anyone knows the answer to this could they let me know in the comments, because I’m bewildered.