Critics of the Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, who are hellbent on seeing his ouster from the ministry with the trigger of a censor motion in Parliament, last Friday left the 8-member Committee hearing with egg on their faces.
The skeptics, who pummel the Minister at the least opportunity were left in cold-sweat after Ken Ofori-Atta expertly answered the issues one after the other and refuted the allegations against him with facts and figures.
The Minister in his opening remarks acknowledge “our economy is facing difficulties and the people of Ghana are enduring hardships. As the person, President Akufo-Addo has put in charge of the economy, I feel the pain personally, professionally and in my soul. I see and feel the terrible impact of rising prices of goods and services on the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Ghanaians. I feel the stress of running a business. But it is the strength and perseverance of the Ghanaian people that inspire me and my colleagues in Government every morning, to press on. That is what gives me the strength to press on to find solutions and relief for Ghanaians to the myriad of problems that our country and the rest of the world are facing, especially, since March 2020.”
Co-chairs, he continued “let me use this opportunity to say to the Ghanaian people what I believe, with courage, every Finance Minister around the world may wish to say to his people now: I am truly sorry. When we set out so purposefully between 2017 and the early parts of 2020, we never imagined that a global pandemic such as Covid, with its prolonged economic fallout, would inflict such pain and suffering upon the Ghanaian people. The shock to our system has been hard and the impact on our livelihoods severe.”
Despite through it all, the minister intimated that Government have not been resting on its oars.
On the allegation of unconstitutional withdrawals from the Consolidated Fund in blatant contravention of Article 178 of the 1992 Constitution, the finance minister rebuffed that follows “I have not breached the Constitution in making payments to support the construction of the National Cathedral of Ghana,” notwithstanding his misgivings about whether Parliament had the power to interpret constitutional matters.
“Hon. Co-Chairs, three days ago, when the Proponents were here, they alleged that I had made payments from the Contingency Fund to support the National Cathedral. I want to state that this is just not true. Let me be categorical. I have taken no money from the Contingency Fund to make payments for the National Cathedral,” Ken Ofori-Atta added.
The man who has been at the receiving end of scurrying attacks parried that accusation of deliberate misreporting of economic data to Parliament as not just unfortunate but simply untrue.
“I and, for that matter, the Ministry of Finance (MoF) have never misreported data to Parliament as has been alleged,” Ken Ofori-Atta indicated.
The Minister maintained the legal position that Act 982 was not passed to take a retrospective effect and that equally, the fiscal and primary balance targets presented to Parliament for those two years did not have any estimate on the finsec clean-up cost above-the-line, on allegations that he had breach the second fiscal rule under the fiscal responsibility Act 2018.
“Consequently, the primary balance target that we were targeting were, actually, surpluses of 1.6% of GDP in the main budget for 2018 and 1.1% in 2019,” the minister expatiated.
