A former Western regional Secretary of the New Patriotic Party, Charles Bissue has said the government does not need to apologize to Ghanaians for going back on its decision to go to International Monetary Fund for support.
According to him global crisis i.e., COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine conflict have not only affected Ghana but global economies at large, a situation that was not experienced under the erstwhile Mahama administration.
He said on TV3 that “No, I don’t think so [government should apologize].”
According to him, “The scenarios are different. In Kufuor’s time, there was a credit crunch that affected the whole world, NDC have never experienced that before. It got to a point that there was an epidemic which was a small locality, 205 people died. So, if you are going back to say that at that time there was a pandemic, what would have happened couldn’t have been managed well.
“We have managed Covid well, we have Ukraine and the Russia war. People are saying we shouldn’t talk about it, it is a fact.”
Meanwhile, a private legal practitioner and a member of the NDC Gordon Edudzi Tamaklo in an earlier engagement noted that the government should apologize to Ghanaians for mismanaging the economy.
“I was expecting the director of the NPP to look the people of Ghana in their faces and with humility apologize for the pervasive deception, the grandstanding, the recklessness, the pervasive corruption that have become the name of the Akufo-Addo /Bawumia/Ken Ofori-Atta administration.
“Regrettably, they have decided, instead of apologizing for their abysmal performance as a government that today has brought all of us on our knees, they have rather decided to engage grandstanding and that is the reason why we are where we are today.”
An International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff team led by Carlo Sdralevich visited Accra during July 6-13, 2022, to assess the current economic situation and discuss the broad lines of the government’s Enhanced Domestic Program that could be supported by an IMF lending arrangement.
At the conclusion of the mission, Mr. Sdralevich issued the following statement:
“Ghana is facing a challenging economic and social situation amid an increasingly difficult global environment. The fiscal and debt situation has severely worsened following the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, investors’ concerns have triggered credit rating downgrades, capital outflows, loss of external market access, and rising domestic borrowing costs.”
