At its core, the warning from Bernard Otabil, a senior official at the Bank of Ghana, as carried by 3News, is not just another bureaucratic statement. It is a cry of alarm wrapped in the careful language of a central banker, and it deserves to be heard with the same urgency we reserve for a fire alarm or a storm warning. When we hear the phrase “misinformation and disinformation,” many of us picture political lies, viral Facebook posts, or the chaotic comment sections of social media. We think of false headlines, edited videos, and angry strangers arguing online. It is easy to file this under “noise” and scroll away, assuming that what happens in the digital world stays there. But Otabil is asking us to look closer, to see how the poison of falsehood seeps into the very fabric of our economic life. He is reminding us that a rumor about a bank’s health can cause a stampede of withdrawals far faster than any official reassurance can stop it. A manipulated video of a politician saying something absurd can shake investor confidence in a currency within hours. A deliberately twisted statistic about inflation or unemployment can alter how millions of ordinary people spend, save, and plan their futures. In other words, misinformation is not a harmless mockery of the truth. It is a direct threat to the stability of economies, and in a nation like Ghana, where trust is already so delicate and social networks so powerful, the stakes are almost impossible to overstate.
To truly understand what Otabil is warning about, we need to make a simple but important distinction. Misinformation is false or misleading information shared without the intent to deceive. It might be an old photo resurfaced and mistaken for current news, a half-remembered fact passed from one person to another, or a well-meaning but wrong interpretation of an official statistic. Disinformation, on the other hand, is deliberately manufactured and spread to cause harm, confusion, or financial gain. It is the fake website, the forged document, the coordinated campaign of bots, the paid influencer who quietly sows doubt about a nation’s economic management. Both are dangerous, but disinformation is more sinister because it is engineered with intent. In the digital age, these two forces have fused into something like a fire that feeds on itself. A single tweet from an unverified account can be screenshot, shared in a WhatsApp group, then picked up by a small blog, then repeated by a local radio station, and by lunchtime it is being discussed as undeniable fact. There is no longer a single gatekeeper, editor, or fact-checker that can stop the spread before it reaches critical mass. And because human brains are wired to prioritize shocking or threatening information, falsehoods often travel faster than truth. We are frightened by the rumor of a currency collapse, so we share it; our fear convinces our neighbours; their fear confirms our own. Before anyone can say “verify your sources,” the rumor has already changed behavior.
That change in behavior is where the real economic damage happens. Economics, despite all its models and numbers, is ultimately about human decisions, and human decisions are driven by stories we believe are true. When falsehoods spread, they distort those stories. Consider something as simple as a rumor that a major bank is about to fail. Even if the rumor is completely baseless, a few account holders may rush to withdraw their money in a panic. Then another group sees the line outside the bank and assumes the rumor must be true, so they join the queue. The bank did nothing wrong, but suddenly it is facing a liquidity crisis caused entirely by fear. That is how misinformation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The same logic applies to the exchange rate. If people are told again and again that the cedi will collapse, they may rush to buy dollars or other stable assets, and their collective rush can actually push the currency down. A rumor becomes the cause of the disaster it predicts. Price instability follows when people hoard goods because they falsely believe shortages are coming, and those hoarding actions create the shortages that were never real. At every level — from the street market to the stock exchange — the economy is a conversation, and false conversations create false realities. Otabil knows this, which is why he does not treat misinformation as a minor annoyance. It is a systemic risk, like a flood or a power outage, but one that spreads through whispers and screens rather than weather and wires.
The Bank of Ghana’s involvement in this issue is not a matter of pride or an attempt to censor critics. It is a matter of survival for the institution’s central function: maintaining confidence. A central bank’s power rests almost entirely on credibility. If people believe the bank will protect the value of their money, they behave in ways that make economic stability possible. If they stop believing, no amount of interest rate hiking or foreign exchange intervention can save the day. This is why Otabil’s remarks, reported by 3News, should not be seen as an attack on free speech, but as a plea for collective responsibility. He is pointing out that every person who shares a false headline, every social media user who retweets an unverified claim, every radio caller who repeats a wild rumor, is unwittingly participating in the destabilization of their own economic environment. This is a bitter pill to swallow, because most of us do not share misinformation with malicious intent. We share because we are anxious, because we want to warn people we love, because a story feels so outrageous that we feel compelled to spread it. The irony is painful: we think we are helping, but we are actually undermining the very things we want to protect. For a nation like Ghana, which aspires to attract investment, build a strong middle class, and grow its economy, the battle for economic stability is partly a battle for the direction of attention and the quality of the stories that shape mass behavior.
Thankfully, there is a human remedy to this human problem, and it is not only the job of central banks, governments, or tech companies. It begins with each of us, in the small, unglamorous moments of daily life. When we receive a suspicious message on WhatsApp, we can pause before forwarding it. We can ask simple questions: Who created this? Who published it? What evidence is offered? Is the source credible, or does it only exist to make me angry or afraid? We can accept that we will sometimes be fooled, because no one is immune, but we can also repair the damage by correcting ourselves publicly and gently correcting others. This is not about being superior; it is about being responsible. It is also about remembering that economic stability is not an abstraction. It is the shopkeeper who can sleep at night because the value of his inventory is stable. It is the young woman who can calculate her school fees without wondering if her savings will have evaporated by morning. It is the family that can budget for food, rent, and medicine without the shadow of panic obscuring every plan. When we let misinformation flourish, we raise the temperature of the entire society, and the poorest, most vulnerable people always feel the heat first. They cannot easily move their money overseas, hedge against inflation, or absorb losses. They depend on a stable currency and stable prices far more than the wealthy do. So, defending the truth is, in a very real sense, an act of economic compassion.
The warning from Bernard Otabil, delivered through 3News, is a reminder that the modern economy runs on attention, and attention can be hijacked. But it is also a call to reclaim that attention for something wiser and kinder. We do not need to silence ourselves or stop debating important issues. A vibrant public sphere is essential for democracy and for economic progress. What we need is to demand better sources, to reward honest journalism, to support institutions that value transparency, and to model a healthier way of talking about money, markets, and risk. We need to remember that no bot or algorithm can feel the pain of a family that loses its savings because of a baseless rumor. That pain is deeply human, and preventing it requires deeply human choices. The next time we see a story that confirms our worst fears, we can take a breath. We can check whether it is real. We can choose not to be a cog in the machine of fear. In doing so, we become more than informed citizens; we become guardians of stability, protectors of the quiet confidence that an economy needs in order to grow. If we learned one thing from Otabil’s warning, it should be that the strength of a currency is not just a matter of reserves and exports. It is a matter of trust, and trust is built one honest conversation at a time.