Accra - President John Kufuor is banking on the economic growth that has made Ghana an African bright spot for international lenders, to return him to another four-year term, but Ghanaians may turn the pinch in their pockets into a thumbs down at the polls tomorrow.
Revenues from record exports of cocoa, declining inflation and a respectable 5 percent growth rate over the past year have helped vault Ghana into the ranks of those nations on the world's poorest continent favoured with development aid.
The country's reputation for stability and tolerance under Kufuor has also translated into a record $1.5 billion (R8.7 billion) in remittances this year from the Ghanaian diaspora.
External reserves of just two weeks inherited by the Kufuor government in 2000 have been built up to four months, helping to keep food prices stable and to slash the inflation rate to 12 percent from 42 percent.
Yet Ghana remains desperately poor, with 40 percent of the country's 20 million people living below the poverty standard of $1 a day set by the UN.
"Nothing has got better. We are still hungry," said Marlee, a market woman. "We cannot see the riches that they say have been brought here."
A member of both the World Bank's highly indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative and the US millennium development programme, Ghana has succeeded in paring its $6 billion external debt while paying for much-needed programmes in health and education.
"HIPC has helped Ghana considerably, saving $100 million that would have been spent on debt servicing," said Kwesi Jonah, the head of the Institute of Economic Affairs, an independent public policy group.
"It has even been used to pay off the internal debt, a lot of which the Kufuor government inherited from Rawlings, but which Kufuor's government has added to as well," said Jonah.
Recent successes are also due to circumstances beyond Kufuor's policies, his main rival, John Atta Mills of the opposition National Democratic Congress, is quick to point out.
"We had good rains," he said at the weekend, adding: "One has to wonder why things are not better for all the rain we had."
The government's continued subsidy of petrol, even as oil prices hit record highs, has been cited as one of the reasons by independent economists.
Jonah said: "Even though the price has been increased to 20 000 cedis per gallon , we are still wasting millions of dollars on petrol subsidies. We could do it when oil was $32 a barrel, but not now."
"There is no point - these are subsidies that benefit the wealthy people living in urban areas, meaning that the villages are subsidising us," he added.
Kufuor faces accusations of corruption for politicising the HIPC process, structuring the distribution of funds to bypass parliament and allocating the bulk of resources to his ruling party's central and southern strongholds instead of the north, which is crippled by poverty levels reaching 70 percent.
"Democracy and poverty cannot sleep together in the same bed," said Jonah. "People are seeing that things are supposed to be better but they are not feeling better." - AFP