Former president John Dramani Mahama has criticized the Akufo-Addo administration’s bizarre attempts to claim responsibility for Ghana’s economic growth in 2017.
According to Mr. Mahama, the New Patriotic Party has put the nation in a financial bind and has been attempting to take credit for the hard work of the National Democratic Congress in 2016, which resulted in the sizeable economic growth the nation saw in 2017.
The records are transparent and show the work that his government performed before leaving office in 2016, according to former president Mahama, who discussed “Africa’s Strategic Priorities and Global Role” at Chatham House in London on January 27.
Answering a question from Tamale North MP, Alhassan Suhiyini on the evidence of the work the NDC party put in to record the 8% economic growth in 2017, Mr. Mahama said: “When we were leaving office in 2016, all the multilateral agencies predicted Ghana was going to grow at 8% because of the work that we have done and in 2017, it grew at 8%. There was no way the current government could have influenced that growth in 2017.”
“The indices show that when we left office, the debt to GDP was 56%… Meanwhile, you inherited it in 2017 at 56% of debt to GDP so what other evidence do you need to attribute Ghana’s fiscal and economic growth to the NDC?”
He also chastised the New Patriotic Party’s government and condemned its domestic debt exchange programme which has got many investors and bondholders agitated.
He said the NDC went through an IMF programme and didn’t have to take Ghanaians through the current debacle.
“There is one significant fact that I kept saying that nobody pays attention to. Under an IMF programme, for the first time in history, we agreed with the IMF that we were going to do zero Central Bank financing so in the 2016 fiscal year, the government implemented its whole budget without taking a single Cedi from the Bank of Ghana.”
