{"id":89947,"date":"2015-02-09T13:00:59","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T13:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=89947"},"modified":"2015-02-09T13:00:59","modified_gmt":"2015-02-09T13:00:59","slug":"mahama-travels-niger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=89947","title":{"rendered":"Mahama travels to Niger"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>President John Mahama is currently in Niamey, Niger where he is attending a meeting of a Presidential Taskforce on the ECOWAS Monetary Cooperation Programme.<\/p>\n<p>[contextly_sidebar id=&#8221;odFlZONAOoGV2YBMYxdhiCjNyALPMXsd&#8221;]President Mahama and his Nigerien counterpart, Mahamadou Issoufou, were mandated by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in October 2013 to spearhead the sub-region\u2019s efforts towards a single currency and monetary union by January 2020.<\/p>\n<p>The two Presidents will receive the report of the taskforce at today\u2019s meeting and review the roadmap towards 2020.<\/p>\n<p>ECOWAS has been\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/2014\/11\/10\/ecowas-slammed-delay-adoption-single-currency\/#sthash.DPZ7sIbI.dpbs\"><span style=\"color: #666699;\"><strong>criticized for its frequent postponement<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0<\/a>of the deadline for the adoption of a single currency.<\/p>\n<p>ECOWAS\u00a0has\u00a0postponed the deadline six consecutive times because member states have been unable to meet the set criteria.<\/p>\n<p>The first date was the year\u00a02000, then it was postponed to 2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and now 2020.<\/p>\n<p>The primary criteria for West African states to achieve the single currency are; single digit inflation rate at the end of each year; a fiscal deficit of no more than 4 per cent of the GDP, central bank deficit financing of not more than 10 per cent of the previous year\u2019s tax revenues, and having gross external reserves that can give a country import cover for a minimum of three months.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>By: Eugenia Tenkorang\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>President John Mahama is currently in Niamey, Niger where he is attending a meeting of a Presidential Taskforce on the ECOWAS Monetary Cooperation Programme. [contextly_sidebar id=&#8221;odFlZONAOoGV2YBMYxdhiCjNyALPMXsd&#8221;]President Mahama and his Nigerien counterpart, Mahamadou Issoufou, were mandated by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in October 2013 to spearhead the sub-region\u2019s efforts towards a single [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[38,17],"class_list":["post-89947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-palaver-newspaper","tag-wassa-akropong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}