Isaac Adongo, Member of Parliament for the Bolgatanga Central district in the Upper East Region, has stated that Ghana’s officials negotiated the $3 billion loan facility with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) badly.
Mr. Adongo stated that the Fund’s press statement announcing the acceptance of the loan facility demonstrates the Finance Minister’s inadequate performance on Ghana’s behalf.
“When you read the IMF report, you will realise that this scheme was poorly negotiated,” the Bolgatanga Central politician stated on Citi FM’s Eyewitness News. The Finance Minister was scouring the halls of the IMF and the Paris Club simply to get this scheme approved.
“You cannot tell anybody what was the government programme and what was on the table, there was nothing like that, and so we ended up with IMF designing a programme and giving it to us because we just didn’t have any direction and the issues that have been raised in that document are so daring that I tend to say that we are in a very, very difficult situation.”“You cannot tell anybody what was the government programme and what was on the table, there was nothing like that, and so we ended up with IMF designing a programme and giving it to us because we just didn’t have any direction and the issues that have been raised in that document are so daring that I tend to say that we are in a very, very difficult situation.”
“This is the first time we have been to the IMF basically not being compliant with the debt sustainability situation of the IMF and the IMF’s own report in the early paragraph makes it very clear that COVID-19 took advantage of pre-existing vulnerabilities of the economy and that it wasn’t COVID-19 that was the problem but just that at the time COVID-19 came, we were suffering from heightened fiscal and external vulnerabilities and these were matters we had raised for a very long time and they [government] didn’t work with them until COVID-19 came and took advantage of these vulnerabilities,” Mr. Adongo added.
The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Wednesday, May 17 granted approval for Ghana’s $3 billion bailout request, aimed at revitalizing the country’s struggling economy after several months of negotiations.
