News:
July 26, 2024
Ranking member on the Finance Committee of parliament Isaac Adongo has slammed the government over its performance with regards to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Opening comments on the 2024 budget review and economic policy presented by the Minister of Finance and Economic planning Dr. Mohamed Amin Adams on Thursday, July 25, 2024, Mr Adongo revealed that two years into the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Ghana is undertaking, the government has already missed out on six (6) performance targets.
He added that in Ghana’s previous IMF programme, performance on wage bill and international reserve was missed, and the current government run to the IMF to allow it to borrow and never concluded on the programme.
“Today, we are getting back to the same thing; government has spent four point five billion Ghana cedis on accumulation of arrears despite they said we should not do that whiles with the programme. They were supposed to have cabinet approval for Bank of Ghana Act as at now no such amendment has been presented”.
We were supposed to see change in our international reserves, we missed it in March and June of this year, we miss it and we are looking at September of this year; we were supposed to have a social spending, we have missed expenditure on that we are heading towards the same situation in 2019”.
According to him, the government has always blamed COVID-19 for the current situation we find ourselves, but the Bank of Ghana issue a statement as at the time we exited the programme in May 2019, five months later raising concerns about the fiscal environment and disclosed that we were likely to end with huge fiscal deficit.
He asserted that the Finance Minister in his presentation of the mid-year budget review for 2024 did not provide any hope to the people of Ghana, adding that there was no single message to alleviate the suffering of Ghanaians.
He said by the time the minister left the floor, dollar was almost fifteen cedis and “we were buying diesel fifteen cedis a litter and they have mismanaged the economy to register depreciation in the cedis about fifty-four percent in 2022”.
Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/Ghanamps.com