Month: May 2018

In December 2015, a Norwegian newspaper published an article accusing the Ghanaian government of having signed a $510 million deal with a company called Ameri, whose CEO was a fugitive from justice in Norway. The newspaper had solicited expert opinion on the deal and been categorically told that the transaction...

There is a very important reason why “think tank/policy activism” is completely different from academic work or academic thought leadership. Academic work is about steadily making incremental, highly specialised, additions to the stock of knowledge, usually through peer-reviewed work. It is rigorous and tough. But it cannot respond rapidly to...

A controversy has been raging in Ghana in recent weeks: the country’s Ministry of Communications says it doesn’t trust the tax declarations of the telecom network operators and want a way to independently gauge their traffic and consequent revenue. This is despite the fact that the telecom companies pay at...

Credit: original diagram by Aayush Look carefully at the diagram above. 1. From 2010, and especially 2015, onwards, agents of the Ghanaian government (notably contractors, GVG, Afriwave and Subah) used to collect logs termed as Call Detail Records (CDRs) generated by the Authentication, Authorisation & Accounting (AAA) systems of the...

Government officials in Ghana have been promoting the notion that unless they can count all the calls and measure all the kilobytes of data downloaded on the nearly two dozen or so main-tier telecom companies, they cannot gauge the revenue of these companies correctly and therefore tax them properly. They...

Should the Ghanaian regulatory authorities continue to insert probes and gateways into and within the telecom network to monitor sales of the country’s mobile network operators directly because they do not trust them to disclose the right numbers and therefore pay the right amount of tax? Further thinking is obviously...

I see that some officials of the Ghanaian government are in a celebratory mood. And who wouldn’t be? If the relative size of public debt has shrunk by nearly 15%, it sure is cause for celebration. So I went over to the Bank of Ghana (BOG) source document to try...

  When many people say things like: “democracy isn’t suited to African circumstances” and stuff like that, it is usually because they haven’t really thought carefully about what democracy, qua “democracy”, is meant to do. Democracy, when carefully analysed, is not a tool for taking efficient decisions. It is not...

I love all my West African friends pondering on the recent events in Windsor and then going on some wakandian history binge, like: “they had a traditional wedding, so why can’t we stick to ours too?” Great. We should. But not because of them. Because, in actual fact, they didn’t...