President of IMANI Ghana, Franklin Cudjoe has stated that government officials who are accusing Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia of putting out wrong figures on the economy are a “funny lot.”
[contextly_sidebar id=”1uqnprPqrmZVrQmXfMMZWVnYgjf9BAs0″]According to him, the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) vice presidential candidate cannot be blamed for the disparities between the figures on the debt to GDP he presented to Ghanaians and that of government.
Cudjoe argued that the nation lacks accurate figures on the economy because it has over the years been “engineered politically.”
“This data credibility issues are engineered politically so that depending on how the data plays out, you will then decide how the narrative should go,” he said, adding that “it is lazy accounting. It is a mixture of lazy accounting and political deviousness.”
Dr. Bawumia has come under attack for supposedly feeding the people of Ghana with wrong data on the economy when he spoke at the Distinguished Speaker Series at the Central University College on Tuesday on the topic: ‘IMF Bailout, Will the Anchor Hold?’
The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) and the Finance Ministry have said Dr. Bawumia’s interpretation of figures during his lecture is misleading.
But the GSS however admitted that there was a mistake with the data on GDP growth rates for 2009 because there was an error during the transmission of the data unto its website but it was subsequently corrected upon detection.
However, speaking on Citi FM’s new analysis programme, The Big Issue, Cudjoe questioned why a small country like Ghana has been unable to put together accurate data on its citizens and the economy saying, “this is a country which is too small for proper accounting not to be done well.”
The IMANI boss remarked that if all those who are attacking Dr. Bawumia had done some “serious academic work before, they would have realised that at a time that you source an item, you note the date and you quote it.”
“The commonsensical question all those loud mouths should have asked Dr. Bawumia was when he sourced his figures. All those chastising Bawumia for academic dishonesty are just a funny lot.”
Ghana lacks proper accounting system
Meanwhile, Financial Analyst, Sydney Casely-Hayford on his part said Ghana does not have a proper accounting system and has adversely affected the figures which are churned out by state institutions mandated to do so including the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS).
He complained saying, “the way we put the numbers together in order to report the accounts of this country are very, very bad… so when you have a debt to GDP calculation which is hovering now between 67% and some 70 something percent, depending on which figures you use and you start questioning the GDP figure and you say he [Bawumia] is being intellectually dishonest, I find that very disingenuous.
He acknowledged that indeed, although Dr. Bawumia’s speech was on a national issue such as the impact of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout on the Ghanaian economy, it was political.
“When Bawumia gets up to speak about the economy, there is no way it will not be a political delivery…because as far as his combatants are concerned on the NDC [National Democratic Congress] side, everything that he says is because he is trying to chalk up points towards winning governance in the next election.”
Casely-Hayford added that “once Bawumia delivers anything, you expect that it is going to be interpreted political and it truly was at the end of the day.”
By: Efua Idan Osam/citifmonline.com/Ghana
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