Former president John Dramani Mahama has described as bizarre efforts by the Akufo-Addo government to take credit for Ghana’s economic growth in 2017.
Mr. Mahama said the New Patriotic Party has driven the country into an economic ditch and has been making attempts at claiming credit for the hard work of the National Democratic Congress in 2016 which led to the significant economic growth the country recorded in 2017.
Speaking on the topic “Africa’s Strategic Priorities and Global Role” at Chatham House in London on January 27, former president Mahama said the records are clear to point to the work that his government did before leaving office in 2016.
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.”