Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr., has expressed disappointment in the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, as he drives Ghana to the International Monetary Fund(IMF) for a bailout.
The President, in a statement issued by the Minister of Information, has directed the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta to "commence formal engagements" with the IMF, "inviting the Fund to support an economic program put together by the Government of Ghana".
Seeking Solace Under IMF
Explaining this economic program for which Ghana runs back to the IMF despite the President's vow never to take the country to this international financial institution which endeared many Ghanaians to elect him to be the Head of State, the Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, in an interview on Peace FM's morning show 'Kokrokoo' on Monday, July 4, 2022 stated that their kind of going to the IMF is for a "balance of payment" to shore up the economy unlike the erstwhile Mahama administration.
" . . when the country was handed over to former President Mahama, there was no external global crisis. It was his own domestic management but at the end, he said to us that they have chewed the meat to the bone, so they are going to the Fund for bailout. This is his words, not mine. What tended up happening is that when they went for the bailout and we came into power, from 2017 to 2019, we saw how the Ghanaian economy performed.
"Today, our economic state has called for us to also go for bailout but it's a different scenario. It's not our internal domestic management that is the cause but the external issues and external pressures that have necessitated our decision to go for this facility," he expounded.
IMF Bailout Equals Guggisberg Economy?
Discussing the issue during 'Kokrokoo' on Tuesday, July 5, Kwesi Pratt alluded to President Akufo-Addo's promise not to send Ghana back to the economic environment pervading during the colonial era of Brigadier-General Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg and wondered if going to the IMF doesn't defeat the promise.
It would be recalled that in the first term of his presidency, President Akufo-Addo told Diplomats at a meeting that the country has outgrown the status of exporting commodities in their raw state without adding value.
“Sadly, however, the structure of our economy has not changed substantially since the era of Governor Gordon Guggisberg – an exporter of raw materials with little or no value-addition activities. This is why I have called our economy the Guggisberg economy,” he lamented, whiles promising that his “government’s economic vision will focus on executing an integrated industrialisation programme, with a clear bias towards supporting our small and medium scale enterprises with access to science and technology, incentives and markets to make them more productive and competitive.”
It is in this light that Mr. Pratt asked; "Are we not going back to the Guggisberg economy today with this IMF bailout?"
To him, the IMF is not a solution to Ghana's problems because history has proven time over time that any moment the country went for an IMF facility, the economy turned worse.
