Power is a mirage. You can sit in the room where it happens, hold the titles, and still be a ghost in the machine of state.
Franklin Cudjoe, the founding president of IMANI Africa, has just delivered a eulogy for the political agency of Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia. His assessment is a sharp, jagged pill for the “Economic Wizkid” to swallow.
Cudjoe’s premise is simple but devastating: Bawumia is a fundamentally “good man” who was essentially a hostage to a system that refused to let him lead the macroeconomy.
“Bawumia is a good man, but he had no power… The guys at the top didn’t listen to him.”
The data of our current economic reality supports this narrative of sidelined expertise. If the man who lectured us on the “arrested cedi” was truly in control, why did the currency break out of its cell?
Cudjoe suggests that the Vice President’s brilliant economic blueprints were often treated as mere suggestions by a kitchen cabinet that prioritized political survival over technical precision and fiscal discipline.
It is a perplexing observation. How does the head of the Economic Management Team become a spectator to a fiscal storm? Cudjoe resolves this by pointing to a centralized authority that choked individual initiative.
Yet, where the door of the treasury was locked, Bawumia found an open window in the digital frontier. While the “conductors” steered the bus toward the IMF, he was quietly building a new digital road.
The tragedy is the gap between his intellectual capacity and his administrative reach. However, despite being sidelined, he birthed the GhanaCard, mobile money interoperability, and the digitalization of the ports.
“He was basically a passenger in a vehicle where the driver and the conductors had their own destination in mind.”
This raises a question for the NPP campaign: If he could build a digital state from the backseat, what could he achieve if he finally had his hands on the steering wheel?
Cudjoe isn’t being cruel; he is being observant. He paints a picture of a man whose reputation was sacrificed on the altar of collective cabinet decisions he likely disagreed with in private.
The debt exchange and spiraling inflation—Cudjoe frames these not as Bawumia’s failures, but as the failures of a government that used him as a shield while actively ignoring his sharpest policy swords.
This “good man” defense suggests that Bawumia chose to build rather than to burn. He focused on systemic structural changes—like Gold for Oil—while the macro-managers fumbled the traditional levers of power.
If the Vice President was indeed powerless in the cabinet room, his digital legacy proves he was never idle. He was a gold-plated architect trapped on a ship where the captain refused to use his map.
Cudjoe’s verdict forces the intelligent voter to ask: Was Bawumia the man hired to paint the building while it was on fire, or the one secretly installing the fire-suppression system?
History usually judges the man holding the pen, but it also remembers the man who built the infrastructure that outlasted the crisis. In Ghana, the Vice Presidency is often where dreams are deputy-sized.
If Franklin Cudjoe is right, Bawumia’s true potential has been the country’s best-kept secret. A leader who produced results in the digital realm while being strategically handcuffed in the fiscal one.
A “good man” who finds a way to build while his hands are tied is a man worth a second look. The passenger might just be the only one who actually knows the way home.
