Dr. Sharif Mahmud Khalid, a member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) economic team, has questioned the Akufo-Addo government over how the economy is being run.
He believes that the economic management team and Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta have failed.
In an interview on Friday, May 19, in connection with the $3billion bailout by the IMF he said “You look at research by JP Morgan that points to the effect that the debt exchange alone is giving bond value loss to about 50 percent. We have never had that before, we have been on the bond market, who runs an economy on bonds for well over 6 years? That is what we have had.”
For his part, Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry, Dr Stephen Amoah, said Mr Ofori-Atta cannot be blamed for the economic challenges.
He asserted that it is true that the majority of the nation’s problems were brought on by external causes beyond the Finance Minister’s control.
Dr. Amoah, a lawmaker for Nyiaeso also responded when asked whether Mr. Ofori-Atta had failed in his role as finance minister after the $ 3 billion IMF bailout: “Even countries that Ghana depends on, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, are all struggling right now.”
“If he has failed as Finance Minister then the world has failed, it is a fact. We talk about giant economies that we even depend on such as UK, US and Asian counties.I came from the UK on the 16th of this month, their base rate which is the government interest rate post covid has been 1600 per cent from 0.25 to 4.5 per cent. On their major news bulletins, they were saying that 40-year all-time high inflation rate.
“Within a period of about 3 months nurses, doctors, teachers, aviation, magistrate courts, and railway workers, they all had been on strike. A lot of things are going on even in the countries we depend on. Post covid inflation rate globally is hovering around 300 per cent, UK was about 1.71 per cent but it went to 11.1 per cent.”
Dr. Amoah
He claimed that the US was around 1.2% but that it increased to roughly 9.1%. He continued by saying that when this is brought up, others cite francophone nations that lack economic sovereignty and that everything about those nations is protected by French law. He stated, “It is a fact that there is hardship, our economy has suffered but it is a fact that it is globally induced.”
Adongo Claims $3 Billion IMF Bailout Was Negotiated Poorly
Isaac Adongo, a Member of Parliament for the Upper East Region’s Bolgatanga Central district, has hinted that Ghana’s officials did a bad job of negotiating the $3 billion credit facility between Ghana and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
According to Mr. Adongo, the Ghanaian Finance Minister did a bad job representing Ghana in the news release issued by the IMF, announcing the acceptance of the credit facility.
The Bolgatanga Central lawmaker said “When you read the IMF release, you will know that this programme was poorly negotiated. The Finance Minister was roaming the corridors of the IMF and the corridors of the Paris Club just to get this programme through.
He further stated that the country did not have any sense of direction and as such, the IMF ended up designing a programme for the nation and that: “the issues that have been raised in that document are so daring that I tend to say that we are in a very, very difficult situation.”
“This is the first time we have been to the IMF basically not being compliant with the debt sustainability situation of the IMF and the IMF’s own report in the early paragraph makes it very clear that COVID-19 took advantage of pre-existing vulnerabilities of the economy and that it wasn’t COVID-19 that was the problem.
“But just that at the time COVID-19 came, we were suffering from heightened fiscal and external vulnerabilities and these were matters we had raised for a very long time and they [government] didn’t work with them until COVID-19 came and took advantage of these vulnerabilities.”
Isaac Adongo
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