Professor at the University of Ghana Business School Godfred Bokpin is predicting doom for the future of this country with the current crop of leadership of the Bank of Ghana still at the helm.
According to Prof Bokpin, all indicators showed in 2019 that Ghana was not in good standing and the warning bells should have been rung by the central bank.
He said for the bank’s officials to ignore these signs and rather take major decisions in that same year tells a lot about what the future holds for the country.
“If as at 2019, Bank of Ghana’s own projections and the rest of them could not have warned us that this is where we were heading towards, then I feel we should feel sorry for this country,” he poured out on The Keypoints on TV3/3FM on Saturday, October 7.
It was during a conversation surrounding the recent demonstration led by the Minority in Parliament to have the Governor of the central bank, Dr Ernest Yedu Kwamina Addison, and his two deputies, Dr Maxwell Opoku-Afari and Elsie Addo Awadzi, resign.
The demonstration, held on Tuesday, October 3, saw thousands march on the streets of Accra with several placards, some of which read: ‘Addison The Printer Must Go’ and ‘Scrap the 10% tax on Sport Betting’.
But at the end point, the Minority stopped short from presenting its petition to the Bank officials after it emerged that Dr Addison was in a meeting with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and had delegated the Director of Security, Wing Commander (rt) Kwame Asare-Boateng, to receive the demonstrators.
Dr Addison’s reaction a day after the protest, in an interview with international banking website Central Banking, appears to have exacerbated his relationship with the Minority.
The Governor described the protest as “completely unnecessary”.
He added: “The Minority in Parliament have many channels to channel their grievances in civilised societies, not through demonstrations in the streets as hooligans.”
He further indicated that the decision to construct an ultra-modern headquarters, one of the reasons for the demonstration, was taken in 2019 “when the bank was profitable and appropriated some of its profits for the new headquarters”.
But Prof Bokpin finds this “unacceptable” due to the poor indicators that year.
“Look, the Ministry of Finance, their own internal debt sustainability analysis as at 2019 clearly had indicated that Ghana’s public debt was unsustainable.”
He also added that the IMF’s final review as part of the 2015 external credit facility (ECF), which was later extended by this government, disclosed “that Ghana could not achieve debt sustainability, which was actually one of the programme objectives. We could not”.
“So, we exited the IMF programme with debt unsustainability still hanging on us. We were still placed at a high risk of debt distress as a country which we officially entered in 2014.”