Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama has told Vladimir Putin that the long friendship between Accra and Moscow must now pay its way, calling for a decisive shift from political goodwill to hard economic cooperation.
Main photo: Russian Presidential Executive Office (kremlin.ru) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
The two leaders held bilateral talks on the sidelines of the Third Russia-Africa Summit, where Mahama said the gathering would be pivotal for relations between the continent and Russia, according to Ghana’s 3News.
‘The environment is right’
Mahama pitched Ghana as a ready investment destination. He described it as Africa’s eighth-largest economy, with a GDP of about $120 billion and steady growth of around 6 per cent a year.
“We believe that the time has come for us to move from just political cooperation to economic cooperation,” he said, adding that conditions were right for mutual investment between the two countries.
He said he expected the summit to boost cooperation across trade, investment, agriculture, energy, infrastructure, education, health, and science and technology.
A joint commission in 2027
The most concrete outcome Mahama disclosed was a meeting of the Ghana-Russia Permanent Joint Commission for Cooperation, to be held in 2027. He said it should give the relationship a proper framework going forward.
The talks build on energy discussions already under way, after Ghana opened talks with Rosatom on its first nuclear power plant.
History as the foundation
Mahama leaned heavily on history. He thanked Russia for standing with Africa during decolonisation and the struggle against apartheid, and noted that Moscow recognised Ghana and established diplomatic relations as early as 1958. He recalled that Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, visited and met Nikita Khrushchev in 1961.
He also cited the Covid-19 pandemic, saying the first vaccines Africa received were Russia’s Sputnik V, as evidence of solidarity. That point is open to debate: Ghana itself became the first country in the world to receive vaccines through the global Covax scheme, in February 2021.
Why it matters
The summit comes as Moscow works to widen its partnerships beyond the West amid its war in Ukraine, and as African governments seek investment from every direction on their own terms. For Ghana, the challenge is turning warm words into factories, jobs and power plants. It fits the pan-African ambition Mahama has set out, including his pledge that he would take Nkrumah’s risks for African unity. DGBN has also examined how the Russia-Africa summit is shifting from diplomacy to delivery.