Financial Analyst, Sydney Casley Hayford, has said the Finance Minister, Seth Terkper, cannot turn Ghana’s ailing economy around.
[contextly_sidebar id=”QGoOrr2TXRn4vQhrGquGgfLm2tFnBekr”]There have been incessant calls on the Minister to resign for failing to implement the right policies to solve Ghana’s economic challenges.
Speaking on Citi FM’s news analysis programme, The Big Issue, Sydney Casley Hayford said “Is Terkper the right person to manage the economy? No; he is not because he took an economy that was not too bad and has brought us to a point where we are being tagged as a Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC).”
He also expressed concern about government’s decision to continuously borrow money from international donors, saying those monies had not been used for its intended purpose.
“Just last year around July-August, we went and borrowed a billion dollars. One year now, we are now back borrowing the same amount again and we are borrowing it at 10.75 percent and the big question you have to ask yourself is; what happened to the billion dollars?”
“We took the 1 billion dollars in order to correct certain things and correct certain imperfections …and one year later we are borrowing the same amount again and we are still talking about borrowing the same amount again or more as we go forward. So clearly, the money that we took which we hope we will use for a particular purpose and fix a particular problem, we did not do that. If we had done that, we would not have been borrowing again” stated.
The Financial Analyst further criticized the National Democratic Congress(NDC) administration, saying the party is only interested in “buying votes and propagating itself to win an election” instead of taking measures to fix Ghana’s economic challenges.
“For them; it is about finding enough money so we can buy votes to ensure that we can succeed until the next election; and I think that is the wrong way to look at what we are trying to do today. I also think we have been very weak in opening up the discussions for solutions on how we can fix the economy.”
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By: Marian Efe Ansah/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @EfeAnsah