President-elect John Dramani Mahama said that stabilising the economy, addressing the electricity value chain debt, and rationalizing taxes and jobs for the youth remain priority areas for his government.
He says though the economy grew at 7.2 per cent in the last quarter of the year, it is still facing challenges and requires urgent attention to get back on its growth trajectory.
Mr. Mahama said this when the national leadership of Ghana Pentecostal and Charismatic paid a courtesy call to him in his office.
“The priority really is the economy. The economy, even though the president sounded very upbeat about the Q3 growth from the level briefing I have, the economy is still very sick. And, there are many areas that we need to work on as quickly as possible, especially the energy sector. The energy sector can derail everything that we’ve done with regard to the debt exchange and with regards to the IMF program because the debts continue to pile up there. ECG’s governance is in a very bad way, and so they are making commercial and technical losses of more than 32%,”
” There’s no utility company that can survive with 32% commercial and technical losses and still continue to be a viable utility. And so as quickly as possible, we need to do reforms in the whole electricity value chain in order that we have better efficiency and performance if we are to have sustainable power going forward,” President Mahama said.
” The priority is to stabilize the economy, reduce waste, rationalize taxes because Ghana is increasingly becoming a high-cost point of doing business. If we’re to remain competitive, we must rationalize the taxes, make them more transparent so that foreign investors feel attracted to come to our country, to come and set up businesses and industries so that we can get employment for our young people. ” He continued.
