President Nana Akufo-Addo has nothing to show for all the money he has borrowed during his first four-year tenure of office, apart from Free SHS, former president John Mahama has said.
The NDC presidential candidate for the 2020 polls says the NPP presidential candidates “only claim to fame” is Free SHS.
“Their [government’s] only claim to fame”, Mr. Mahama said, “is Free SHS and, so, Free SHS is being funded from the oil revenues but aside from that there’s nothing to show for it and the signs were there that this economy was being mismanaged.”
In an interview with Woezor TV on Friday, 23 October 2020, Mr. Mahama also accused Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta of cooking up figures for Ghanaians and the IMF.
He noted that Mr. Ofori-Atta has proven to be a failure as far as his performance with the economy is concerned, considering the kind of economy he inherited.
“The IMF has been a bit hypocritical in all this because the signals have been there. It’s not today that we raised the issue of the Finance Minister cooking the books. He’s been cooking the books over the last four years”, the flagbearer of the NDC said.
He explained: “What he does is: he leaves out some big-ticket budget items and puts them as footnotes so that he can get a better fiscal report to give to the international community”.
“He’s used it to fool the IMF, he’s used it to fool Moody’s, Fitch and all the rating agencies, he’s used it to fool the Economist Intelligence Unit, all of them, by giving a rosy picture that they are better economic managers but with the kinds of resources we left him, I’m surprised and shocked at his very abysmal performance,” Mr. Mahama alleged.
In his view, Mr. Ofori-Atta should have built a better economy from what he inherited rather than run it down the way he has done.
“We managed this economy with one oil field, the Jubilee field if you remember. At the time we were leaving office, we had completed two more oil fields that virtually tripled revenues from oil. With that kind of extra revenue, one could just imagine what they could have done in terms of transforming this economy but they’ve not been able to. I mean, you can see everywhere, there’s nothing to show for it,” he noted.
Source: TheBBCghana.Com
