This week I was a guest of the Bloomberg Business Media Innovators 2017 forum that took place in Accra, Ghana, bringing together leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators at the forefront of trends that are shaping media and technology.
It turned out to be a great opportunity to see, and appreciate, for the first time, the understated real driver of recent economic prosperity of this West African nation.
The gathering is part of the broader Bloomberg Media Initiative Africa, a pan-African programme launched by founder Mike Bloomberg in 2014 to build media capacity, convene international leaders and improve access to information in order to advance transparency, accountability and governance on the continent.
In attendance was Matt Winkler, the co-founder of Bloomberg News, who was recruited by the Bloomberg founder from The Wall Street Journal to start the news business in the company.
Matt famously told Mike that Bloomberg was in the news business long before he joined except that the news was "in tabular form, in graphical form, numbers and lines on paper and computer screens" - all he had to do was reduce it to text that people could read and understand.
At this year's forum, Matt made a valid point about how mobile payment systems had revolutionised the Africa case.
7.9% is the Ghanaian government's economic growth forecast for 2017
— In numbers
"From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, handheld phones are letting people become their own ATMs, increasing economic activity by enabling payments for food, travel, school and business. Wireless communication is driving economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa much as the railroad did in the
19th-century United States, accounting for almost a tenth of global mobile subscribers and a growth rate that's beating the world," Matt wrote during the forum.
"Nowhere is the trend more pronounced than in Ghana, where the value of products and services produced by the information and communication sector surged 239% since 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, by far the fastest growth of any economic sector.
"Such explosive growth helped Ghana improve its creditworthiness and lower the average cost of public and private borrowing to 6.7% from 9.1% during the past 12 months. The economy continued to expand at a rate of 6%, and economists surveyed by Bloomberg say it will grow another 6.7% next year, almost double its 3.5% rate in 2016."
Of course, Ghana still faces immense challenges, as articulated by President Nana Akufo-Addo, who paid us a surprise visit during one of the sessions and engaged our small group quite candidly and openly.
Akufo-Addo shared some of the challenges that have come with economic growth of around 5% in the past three years, when he told us that Ghana imports as much as $2.2-billion (about R31-billion) of food every year - which is almost equivalent to the total amount of cocoa that it exports every year. Scandalous, he said.
On the day I flew back to South Africa, to the news that a coup was well on its way in Zimbabwe, the finance minister of Ghana was presenting his budget speech.
While our finance minister told us last month to expect lower growth of 0.7%,
Ken Ofori-Atta told Ghanaians that the government had raised its 2017 economic growth forecast to 7.9% and expects 6.8% growth next year as the economy recovers.
The country is trying to recover from very high public debt and a huge fiscal deficit, which has forced it into an IMF loan programme.
"All the indicators are improving. Inflation is coming down, interest rates are declining and the government has significantly stabilised the power situation enabling industries to function," Ofori-Atta said in a speech, outlining plans to reduce electricity tariffs by 13% for residential customers and up to 21% for industry.
Yes, of course South Africa is no Ghana. Ghana's GDP per capita is $1514, South Africa's is $5274.
But numbers don't lie, and clearly something big is happening in the home of the Black Stars. Pay attention.
• Khumalo is chief operating officer of MSG Afrika and presents 'Power Business' on Power98.7 at 6pm Monday to Thursday
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