Currencies do not trade on fundamentals alone. They trade on expectations — on what millions of ordinary people believe will happen next. That was the argument Hajia Rabi Salifu carried onto Joy Prime’s Prime Morning show in December 2022, at the height of the cedi’s most difficult year in a generation.
Fresh in her role as Deputy National Communications Director of the NPP, she made a charge that set the morning’s agenda: that the currency’s slide was being worsened deliberately, by coordinated voices on social media whipping up fear about where the exchange rate was headed.
“They threw in speculations, people held the dollars and our cedi was underperforming.”
Her reasoning followed a pattern every market watcher recognises: when people are told, insistently and loudly, that the dollar can only get stronger, they respond rationally to the fear — buying and hoarding dollars, delaying conversions, pricing goods defensively. Each individual choice is small; together they become a self-fulfilling prophecy that no central bank intervention can fully offset.
The Responsibility That Comes With A Platform
Pressed by the host on whether she could substantiate the claim of an organised campaign, she insisted she had evidence for what she was describing. But beyond the partisan back-and-forth, her deeper point was about responsibility in the digital age: influencers with large followings are no longer bystanders to economic events — their words move markets, and reckless amplification of panic has real victims, from the trader pricing imported goods to the family watching its savings shrink.
Speculation, she argued that morning, is not analysis, and fear is not a policy critique. Ghanaians deserve a national conversation about the economy that is honest about challenges without manufacturing despair — because confidence, once broken, is the most expensive thing a country ever has to rebuild.
Based on her appearance on Joy Prime’s Prime Morning, 12 December 2022, as reported by MyJoyOnline (article by Lawrencia Sarfowaa Oworae).
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