After the Queen's successful State visit last year - President Clinton had preceded her - Ghana is preparing itself for the next challenging event that, if completed successfully, will confirm the West African nation's reputation as the standard bearer for economic and political reform on the continent.

In eight months President Jerry Rawlings will stand down. The former flight lieutenant, who twice took power by force in Ghana and was twice democratically elected, has presided since 1986 over a programme of economic stabilisation and liberalisation that has heartened the international community and set an example to the rest of Africa.

But in December he is to be replaced and a new president elected. Thus Ghana, the first of Britain's African colonies to be given independence in 1957, will establish another record. It will become the first African state in which a former military leader who became a freely elected president, ended his term of office peacefully and allowed the electorate to choose his successor. This will be no mean feat on a continent that, during the past 40 years, has been a byword for failed hopes and for political and economic instability and corruption.

After a hairy ride under the autocratic and profligate rule of Kwame Nkrumah, and through a series of coups and incompetent and corrupt military and civilian regimes that brought the country to its knees, Ghana has, since the early Eighties, enjoyed a period of political stability and economic resurgence under the guidance of President Rawlings, and with the help of international aid.

Five years ago the President launched what he called "Vision 2020", a co-ordinated programme of economic and social development, with the ambitious aim of making Ghana a middle-income country in 20 years. It requires the boosting of the gross domestic product from $7 billion to $43 billion. To achieve it will also require economic growth of at least 8 per cent a year.

To meet this target state enterprises have been privatised, much of the economy has been deregulated and inward investment has been promoted.
Electricity tariffs have been quadrupled and value-added tax introduced - this month it was increased from 10 to 12.5 per cent.

Conditions bear no comparison to the misery
and desolation of 25 years ago

International donor countries have supported the programme with aid that, at its peak, was running at $800 million a year. "We had no alternative," says the President. The goal is to make Ghana a centre for transport, manufacturing, packaging, wholesaling and the transhipment of goods.

Throughout a seven-year period, economic growth averaged 4.3 per cent - almost twice the African average. This has begun to be reflected, however modestly, in social indicators. Life expectancy has climbed, to 59 years from 55, during a five-year period. Adult literacy has risen to more than 75 per cent, from just 31 per cent in 1970.

In spite of the reforms and the progress towards a market-driven and private-sector led economy, Ghana is today suffering an economic downturn that could threaten all the gains of the past 14 years. Put starkly, while production of basic exports such as cocoa, gold and timber has risen, prices in the second half of last year collapsed. And the cost of its imported oil has doubled.

"We entered 1999 with a lot of hope that it was going to be easier than 1998," says Kwabena Duffour, the governor of the Bank of Ghana, ruefully.

"For the first six months things were quite good. By May inflation had come down to 9.4 per cent. Then during the second half of the year we had a problem with external shock. The price of cocoa started trembling, gold prices started going down and the price of crude oil, which had hovered around $10 per barrel in January, started rising and by the end of the year it was around $25."

This has been a cruel twist of fate for the 20 million Ghanaians who enjoy the reputation of being among the most industrious and enterprising, as well as the liveliest and friendliest, people on the continent. A third of them are classified as living in poverty - which in Africa means poverty of a very basic kind.

Electricity supply in rural areas reaches only to the villages closest to main roads and water supplies are met from boreholes.

Life is hard, people will tell you on Liberation Avenue in the capital Accra, and in village markets in rural areas. Yet the ones who can remember the years before Rawlings's rule insist that present conditions bear no comparison to the misery and desolation of 25 years ago.

Tarmac roads have replaced dirt tracks in the rural areas, and in Accra, which has a population of more than one million, most of the shanty towns around the capital have been replaced by clusters of modern houses and flats.

The telephone service has been dramatically improved and tourism, the third largest foreign currency earner, has led to the construction of several new five-star hotels. Consumer spending has been buoyant, leading to a growth of light manufacturing industry. Now, faced with the collapse in the price of their commodity exports, Ghanaians are looking for, and finding, ways of adding value to their gold, cocoa and timber products.

They are also developing a range of non-traditional exports - such as fresh tropical fruits which are being exported to Britain within 24 hours of being picked. And inflation, which was around 70 per cent three years ago, has been brought down to 13.8 per cent.

Fortunately, says one expatriate businessman, the Ghanaians seem to be taking the difficulties in their stride. "Well, you can't have sunshine all the time," says one trader in Accra's Makala Market, philosophically. * This Focus supplement has been produced by The Times in association with Pioneer News, an Impact Media Company of 3, Hanover Square, London, W1R 9RD

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