Isaac Adongo, the deputy ranking member of Parliament’s Finance Committee, has said that the 2021 budget was not honest in revealing the country’s debt burden.
According to him, the budget’s debt stock of GH291.6 billion left out many components, including the IMF facility used by the government to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
He said the Bank of Ghana and the Ministry of Finance were describing the country’s debt stock in a very narrow way, which did not represent the true situation, on CITI TV, The Point of View on Monday 22nd March 2021.
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“The Bank of Ghana has a narrow view of our public debt… It is only the debt that goes through the Bank of Ghana that the Bank of Ghana is aware of. Public debt such as the one sitting at the GETFund, the over $1.5 billion, the Bank of Ghana does not know about it… So how come the Ministry of Finance always agrees with the narrow view [of the Bank of Ghana]… Conspicuously missing [from the budget] are the financial commitments that we borrowed under COVID,” he said.
“The total public debt has increased from GH¢122 billion, which is 69% of GDP to GH¢291.6 billion, which is 76.1% of GDP, as of the end of December 2020… Included in the debt stock and the debt to GDP ratio are the following non-recurrent burdens that we had to deal with as a matter of urgency; the physical impact of COVID-19, which is GH¢19.7 billion, the cost of the financial sector clean-up, which is GH¢21 billion, and the cost of excess capacity charges paid to IPPs, which is also GH¢12 billion,” the minister read.
On Monday, Adongo, who is also a Member of Parliament for Bolgantanga Central, questioned the figure on The Point of View.
He estimated that the country’s public debt stock will exceed GH299 billion in 2020 if all of the government’s new commitments and spending were added together.
Mr. Adongo has previously expressed concerns regarding the country’s debt stock.
In 2020, he said that the Akufo-Addo government was regressing Ghana by plunging the country into severe debt.
He said that the government was accruing around GH 3 billion in debt per month on average.
“The NDC was adding an average of GHS1.15 billion to our public debt per month, for a total of GHS13 billion a year, but President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is adding GHS3 billion per month, for a total of GHS36 billion a year, and very clearly, the numbers are showing a very scary picture,” he said at a public forum organized by the Coalition For Restoration (CFR) to assess the Akufo-Addo.
Source: ATLFMNEWSROOM
