African leaders have urged a shift away from gross domestic product (GDP) as the main growth measure, pressing instead for value retention and economic sovereignty.
The call dominated the 12th Ishmael Yamson and Associates Business Roundtable, held in Accra on Thursday, 28 May, under the theme of unlocking the next quarter century. Policy makers, corporate leaders and development strategists argued that Africa’s reliance on extractive growth models, now mirrored in the digital economy, leaves the continent creating wealth without keeping it.
Much of the debate turned on the gap between GDP and gross national product (GNP). GDP counts everything produced within a country’s borders regardless of ownership, while GNP captures income earned by a country’s own citizens and firms, including earnings abroad, and strips out profits foreign companies send home. Speakers said the gap matters most for resource dependent economies, where headline GDP can climb even as local jobs and wealth stay thin.
Ishmael Yamson Jr., Chief Executive Officer of the host firm, said conventional metrics hide how little economic activity benefits local economies, describing GDP as a measure of extraction when foreign firms repatriate dividends without creating jobs. He challenged executives to merge balance sheets across borders and form Pan African ventures able to rival established global players, warning that treaties alone do not build supply chains.
Finance Minister Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson echoed the warning, telling delegates that Africa’s enduring problem has been the export of value and the import of dependency, a pattern he said is now repeating in digital form as the continent’s data leaves its shores. He pressed the audience to ask who owns Africa’s digital networks, who stores its data and who controls its payment systems.
Forson said Ghana is targeting 3,000 megawatts of additional generation capacity by 2030, with 30 percent from renewables, calling reliable power a precondition for industrialisation. He noted that Africa loses an estimated US$25 billion each year to outages despite its energy endowments, and that intra African trade sits at about 15 percent of total trade against nearly 70 percent in Europe and roughly 50 percent in Asia.
Dr. Nii Moi Thompson, Chairman of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), delivered the most data heavy assessment, showing that sub Saharan Africa has slipped on key infrastructure indicators over 25 years. Electricity use per head fell from about 452 to 431 kilowatt hours while East Asia’s grew more than 300 percent, and manufacturing’s share of GDP dropped from 16.2 percent to 10.9 percent as Asia’s climbed to 28 percent.
He put Ghana’s labour productivity at US$11.60 an hour against a world average of US$23, and said 92 percent of businesses operate informally, supplying 80 percent of jobs but only 27 percent of GDP.
“We do not have jobless growth. We have growth-less jobs,” Thompson said, announcing a new framework that will track GDP alongside employment and wage growth.
He blamed much of the regression on abandoned long term planning, citing four national plans drawn up since 2015 that were never implemented. Thompson said President Mahama has directed the commission to prepare a consolidated plan rooted in the Constitution’s directive principles, and that Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) are now being sanctioned for spending outside approved plans.
Augustine Chiew, Chief Technology Officer for Public Services at Huawei, urged governments to treat digital infrastructure as a competitiveness priority, linking better connectivity to higher income per head. Drawing on visits to seven countries, he said projects often start strongly but stall after the first phase, contrasting that with successive planning cycles that build on each other.
