Isaac Adongo, the member of parliament for Bolgatanga Central Constituency in the Upper East Region, has hinted that Ghana’s officials did a bad job of negotiating the $3 billion credit facility between Ghana and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
According to Mr. Adongo, the Finance Minister did a bad job representing Ghana in the news release issued by the Fund announcing the acceptance of the credit facility.
The Bolgatanga Central legislator speaking to the media remarked that, “when you read the IMF report, you will see that this scheme was poorly negotiated. Just to get this proposal approved, the finance minister was seen pacing the halls of the Paris Club and the IMF.”
“You cannot tell anybody what was the government programme and what was on the table, there was nothing like that, and so we ended up with IMF designing a programme and giving it to us because we just didn’t have any direction and the issues that have been raised in that document are so daring that I tend to say that we are in a very, very difficult situation.”
“This is the first time we have been to the IMF basically not being compliant with the debt sustainability situation of the IMF and the IMF’s own report in the early paragraph makes it very clear that COVID-19 took advantage of pre-existing vulnerabilities of the economy and that it wasn’t COVID-19 that was the problem but just that at the time COVID-19 came, we were suffering from heightened fiscal and external vulnerabilities and these were matters we had raised for a very long time and they [government] didn’t work with them until COVID-19 came and took advantage of these vulnerabilities,” Isaac Adongo added.
The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Wednesday, May 17 granted approval for Ghana’s $3 billion bailout request, aimed at revitalizing the country’s struggling economy after several months of negotiations.
Source: Citinewsroom
