Govt since 2018 has been understating its budget deficit - Kwakye Ofosu
Finance minister is doing creative accounting – Mahama
Former Deputy Minister for Information, Felix Kwakye Ofosu, has accused the government of massaging figures on Ghana's economy to make it look better than it is.
According to Kwakye Ofosu, the finance minister has for a long while been understating the government budget deficit to hide the extent to which Ghana's economy has been mismanaged.
In a JoyNews interview monitored by GhanaWeb, the ex-deputy finance minister said the government even had to issue a statement to correct the 9 per cent budget deficit it stated for 2021 to 12 per cent after agitations in the financial market.
"It is an incontrovertible fact that this government led by the finance minister has been massaging the figures. They have been trying to confuse the extent of the damage that they have done to the economy by presenting figures which make the situation look much better than it actually is.
"… since 2018, they have been deliberately understating the budget deficit and hiding key essential items, under what they claim to be footnotes in order that the deficit will be lower," he said.
Asked whether he had proof of the accusation he had made, Ofosu said, "only last week in the Finance Minister's purported economic measures, he claimed that between 2017 to 2019, they had kept the budget deficit under 5%. He repeated this claim in the 2020 budget.
"Meanwhile, the budget deficit for 2018 was 7 per cent. The budget deficit for 2019 was 7.5 per cent. The deficit for 2020 was 15.7 per cent. The deficit for 2021 was 12 per cent. In fact, just after he read the 2022 budget in November, the market reacted adversely to it because they did not believe the figures that he was quoting; he quoted 9% as the deficit for 2021," he added.
Meanwhile, former President John Dramani Mahama has accused the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta of engaging in creative accounting because he failed to add huge liability numbers that the government had accrued to the financial statement of the country.
Speaking at a meeting with National Democratic Congress (NDC) supporters in the United States of America, Mahama said that the World Bank had even warned the government to be transparent with Ghanaians and tell them the true state of the country's economy.
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Former Deputy Minister for Information, Felix Kwakye Ofosu