Gov’t determined to turn around current hardships, Finance Minister says
The Finance Minister says the Akufo-Addo led government will do whatever it can to end the prevailing hardship.
Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta said the government will not renege on this commitment.
He made this known when he presented the 2022 mid-year budget to Parliament for approval on Monday, July 25.
According to him, this government has the track record of turning around crisis situations.
Mr. Ofori-Atta cited the state in which the economy was when the current government took over in 2017.
“We are not wavering at all in our resolve to turn this country around. Ours is a history of turning things around when the country is in crisis. When the NPP government took over the reins of government in 2017, we inherited a challenged economy under an IMF programme, which we successfully turned around and exited the programme in 27 months.
“That is a fact. If the economy was not on track, we would not have been given the all clear. That was why in April 2019, satisfied with the stability we had brought to the economy and the policies we were implementing to sustain growth, the fund gave us the all clear to exit the programme.”
He also restated that the economy was performing well until the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak.
“Ghana’s growth rate had moved from 3.7% in 2016, the lowest since 1992 to average 7% in 2017. We had cut the rate of inflation by 33% 7.9%. By the end of 2019, average lending rates had dropped from the 30s to 23.6% and is still dropping,” he said.
