At a press conference to highlight the dangers of Ghana’s piling debts to citizens, Communications Officer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Sammy Gyamfi, said the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government has added a whopping GH¢38 billion to Ghana’s Public debt in only three and half years.
According to him Ghana’s debt situation under the NPP is far more than any government has done in the history of Ghana and far more than all successive governments since independence in 1957.
“In fact, per our current total public debt of GH¢258.8 billion, that is as at June 2020, every Ghanaian in Ghana today is indebted to the tune of about GHS10,000,” he said.
He said Ghana’s current debt position of a debt-to-GDP ratio of 76.7% is highly unsustainable and exceeds the acceptable debt threshold.
“Our current debt position is worse than where we were when we joined the HIPC [Highly Indebted Poor Country] debt relief programme in the year 2001, at which time our debt-to-GDP ratio stood at 61%,” he stated.
The press conference on Ghana’s debt situation comes shortly after Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, described the projections made by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) regarding Ghana’s debt situation as mere statistics.
The Minister told TV3’s Etornam Sey in an interview on Monday, October 26 that the government was not too concerned about the debt because attention was focused on spending the funds to protect Ghanaians against the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
But the NDC at the press conference, on Wednesday, October 28 called on voters to “ignore government’s deceptive semantics about Ghana’s catastrophic debt position.”
The NDC is hoping to wrestle power from the NPP in the upcoming elections on December 7 in what is billed to be a tight presidential contest between NDC’s presidential candidate, John Dramani Mahama and incumbent Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
File photo of some Ghanaians at in a market