Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta has rehashed government’s resolve to revive the economy.
Delivering the Mid-Year Review of the Budget Statement and Economic Policy of the Government for the 2022 financial year in Parliament today, July 25, 2022, Mr. Ofori Atta said government has a track record of reviving the economy.
He is thus confident the current economic challenge will be no different.
“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. Ghana’s growth rate had moved from 3.7% in 2016, the lowest since 1992 to an average 7% in 2017 to 2029. We had cut the rate of inflation by 33% to 7.9%. By the end of 2019, average lending rates had dropped from the 30s to 23.6% and is still dropping.“
“The country is certainly not out of the woods as revenues remain very low, and we have been left with billions in arrears to pay and more bills to pay from numerous contracts,” he added.
Posted by: Emmanuel Romeo Tetteh.
