Ghana’s public debt stock has now increased by GHS30 billion from GHS122.3 billion of January of last year to GHS140billion of the same period in 2018, the Minority in parliament has said.
That is why, in the Minority’s view, President Nana Akufo-Addo failed to mention the debt stock in parliament on Thursday, 8 February when he delivered his second State of the Nation Address.
At a press conference on Friday, 9 February, Minority Leader Haruna Iddrisu said: “In his address last year, President Akufo-Addo pegged the total public debt at GHS122.3billion, yet he failed yesterday [Thursday] to give a corresponding figure for this year.
“We are certain that the president conveniently neglected to provide information on our total debt as of end-year 2017 because the figures will badly expose his pre-election propaganda about the subject”.
According to the Minority, “Official figures as put out by the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of Ghana, peg our public debt at nearly GHS140billion as of November 2017.
“Additional borrowing between that period and now coupled with the energy sector bond of GHS4.7billion, which the IMF and World Bank classify as public debt, means that this will balloon to about GHS150billion, representing an increase of about GHS30billion over the January 2017 figure or 73 per cent of GDP,” Mr Iddrisu noted.
In his view, “the most worrying observation about the NPP’s borrowing is that they have virtually no major capital investment to show for it unlike the NDC government that has the best record of capital or infrastructure development in the fourth republic with the GHS87billion borrowed in eight years under our tenure.
“It is this grim statistics that the president cunningly failed to disclose in order not to appear as having gone back on he and his vice-president’s word not to borrow during the 2016 election campaign.
“We are all witnesses to the colossal borrowing they have been engaged in. They have found out the hard way that haughty claims of expertise in economic management in opposition do not readily translate into performance in government.
“Even more misleading was the president’s claim about the rate of debt accumulation. He claimed that the rate of debt accumulation has slowed”, which the Minority said it contests.
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