Hon Benjamin Komla Kpodo, the Member of Parliament for Ho Central, has made a mockery out of the comment made by the Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta, who presented the mid-year budget in parliament yesterday.

According to the Ho Central MP, the Finance Minister has not spotted any corners and therefore, must not be allowed to say that he has.“We are no more near the corner, it is a sharp curve,” he opined.

“The minister says that he has turned the corner but the facts prove that he has swerved the corner. He alone stated clearly that he has downgraded the forecast from 2.5 to 1.5. If he has turned the corner, then he should have gone much higher than that.”
Benjamin Komla Kpodo

He stressed that there is a distinct contrast between what is occurring in Japan and what is occurring in Ghana, asserting that Ghana will lose the race if Ghana is compared to Japan at any point. He expressed his concern with the budget, since he observed that although the original amount was lower in November, the amended figure showed an increase of GHC5.8 billion. “In this economy, how is a downward revision preferable?” he questioned.

“What this budget is telling us is that they have vied GHC6.1 billion to go and pay the increased current expenditure which is compensation. That is a serious violation of the law. We are operating by the law. So, in fact, we shall take him to court over this violation of the public financial law.
“The minister announced that there is a reduction in expenditure but for us, it has not gone down enough. We have realized that there is a GHC9 billion shortfall in expenditure, so what we want to say is a drastic gov’t cut down in expenditure and not what we are seeing. We have to realign some of the ministries. It has been said time and time again and nothing has been done about it.”
Benjamin Komla Kpodo

According to Benjamin Komla Kpodo, there is no need for deputies who work in the roads ministry. He begged Parliament to depend on the reliable organizations in the road ministry, so that the country could reduce spending. He further stated that there was a minister for each region, thus, he did not understand why there were so many ministers crammed into the ministries.

He noted that there are numerous SOEs with a sizable number of deputies. Therefore, he encouraged the government to fire all of these deputy CEOs from their positions, including VRA, TOR, BOST, and CPC. “All those state-owned enterprises should not have these deputies functioning and draining our resources,” he stated.

Revenue Has Been Used Wisely

On her side, Hon. Sheila Bartels, the MP for Ablekuma North Constituency asserted that the government had built a road in Ho, therefore she could not understand the Ho Central MP’s argument that the economy had declined during the discussion, even though the revenues raised had been wisely and generously spent.

“I have seen myself protest all over the world and I have seen various parliaments fighting because of the economic turbulence all over. When our finance minister spoke, he mentioned that the challenges he had to deal with, especially on expected revenues from foreign sources, we had an expenditure of GHC26 billion but have still been able to manage a capital budget.
“We’ve had to deal with a drop in the expected revenues of oil. The dollar has dropped, so that has affected our revenue we will receive to balance our budget. However, we have maintained our capital budget within that. We were not able to access capital market like we were supposed to.”
Sheila Bartels

She explained how importers who were bringing in goods, suddenly raised import rates by seven times, which boosted the prices of items sold. She added that this had happened in other countries outside Ghana as well.

“And so why are we questioning the inflation rate? So, this shows that there has been a turnaround, since it has either been maintained or reduced. The things we are doing is what is creating jobs and putting more money into our pockets. As we speak, we are an import led country, we import almost anything.
“So why don’t we reduce the dependence of import and process more of our local stuff. Whatever this gov’t is doing so we generate more domestic revenues and what the finance minister has said, made me believe that we are on the right path. So many people have said that we need to cut expenditure and that is what we have done. Everyone here is a witness to that.”
Sheila Bartels