Former President John Dramani Mahama, has revealed that government has made COVID-19 a “scapegoat” by blaming the country’s current economic predicament on the pandemic.

Mr Mahama indicated that over the period, government has done nothing but offer “litany of excuses” as reasons for the economic situation in the country. He explained that these reasons by government are unacceptable.

“The list of excuses offered by this government for the economic mess keeps growing by the day. When it has been convenient, COVID-19 has been made the scapegoat and has been blamed for our woes. The Russian-Ukraine war has also featured prominently on the excuses list as have the so-called financial sector clean-up and supposed excess capacity payments in the energy sector.”
John Mahama

Addressing the nation on the theme: ‘Ghana At A Crossroads’, the former President noted that the facts reveal that while no one can run away from its impact on the global economy, the COVID-19 pandemic paved way for the Government of Ghana to receive an “unprecedented windfall” that previous governments could only dream off. Mr Mahama highlighted that over GHS 30 billion, “sufficient to plug the revenue shortfall” of GHS 12 billion anticipated for 2020, was made available to government from various sources.

“The funding sources ranged from our development partners to internal buffers like the Stabilization Fund which was set up by an NDC administration, and other generous donors.”
John Mahama

Among the generous offers Mr Mahama noted include: 1 billion USD facility from the IMF, 200 million USD from the Stabilization Fund, 430 million USD from the World Bank, 400 million USD out of the 1 billion USD SDR provided to BOG, over 100 million from AfDB and bilateral partners and 20 billion Ghana Cedis from the BOG.

Impact of COVID-19

Mr Mahama explained that COVID-19 affected almost every country on earth including West African neighbours with whom Ghana shares similar economic characteristics. However, he noted that neighbouring countries such as Cote d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin, Guinea, Nigeria, Liberia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, have emerged from this pandemic “comparatively unscathed” and with “relatively stronger fundamentals” as compared to that of Ghana.

Ghana, Mr Maham indicated, has incurred and recorded “astronomical double-digit budget deficits” and huge public debts than its West African peers. Long before COVID-19, he opined that it was evident that the economy was being mismanaged.

“I cautioned against the mismanagement. By 2019, our deficit and debt figures had already reached distress levels. This is a fact which was recently corroborated by the World Bank through its country representative in Ghana. Unprofessionally, the real figures were always grossly understated under the guise of ‘appendices, memorandum and below the line items’ in our budgets. It is this creative accounting and cooking the books deliberately done in a bid to conceal the true extent of our economic problems that has eventually caught up with this government.”
John Mahama

The former President noted that government should have made judicious use of the resources obtained due to COVID to cushion Ghanaians against the disease and spending it strategically to stimulate people-centred economic recovery. Contrarily, Mr Mahama revealed that the Akufo-Addo administration saw the “windfall as an avenue for wasteful expenditure and a conduit for unmerited electoral success”.