The former Finance Minister Seth Emmanuel Terkper has indicated that the issue about the ruling government’s communicators blaming the economic woes largely on Covid-19 and Russia-Ukraine war cannot be wholly true but rather a case of indiscipline and misapplication of funds leading to fiscal and debt vulnerabilities which had existed way before the aforementioned crises struck.
Mr. Terkper made these revelations last Friday on a Metro TV’s Good Morning Ghana’s special holiday edition dubbed “One on One With Former Finance Minister”.
The program’s host, Dr. Randy Abbey during the exclusive interview had ‘pushed’ the former Finance Minister to the wall asking why during his tenure they didn’t experience Covid-19 or Russia-Ukraine war which were global economic shocks and yet their growth rate, inflammation and the strength of the cedi to the dollar were all not quite good at the time of his exit, not forgetting the excruciating endurance of ‘Dumsor’ for nearly four years.
In his response, the Former minister stated that it’s true that every Minister for Finance faces challenges but if you compare three oil fields under the NPP government to one oil field under the NDC’s rule and still find the economy in such a quagmire as it is today, then sincerely speaking the NDC can be said to have done better because the NDC also faced similar challenges.
“Remember right from Dr. Dufuor’s time as finance minister under NDC, the biggest challenge he faced was Single Spine. After all, Single Spine was not a President Mill’s(late) policy, Single Spine was just an experiment not tested which was bequeathed to the NDC by NPP and civil servants were told that it will be implemented so the new president could not renege on it. Though we initially suspended it for a year and even after a year huge borrowing had to go in to supporting it. But the worst was when the crude oil prices crashed in 2015 and so by March 2016 we were back in parliament trimming the budget because our debt was going up and there was no way we could have resolved it with borrowing. And despite all that we managed to have the best record in the last 10yrs when it comes to deficit”, Terkper recounted.
On the issue of the ‘Dumsor’ he said, it was purely disruption of supply of gas from Nigeria(West Africa pipeline) which caused the dumsor but of course we were told it will be repaired until H.E JD Mahama got fed up and said let’s fine our own solutions and that’s why KarPowership, Ameri and others came in. So after they repaired the gas pipeline, power was already being stabilized and NPP has conceded that we resolved dumsor.”
“If you underestimate my little crisis you won’t prepare for the big one that’s how come when the big one(Covid) struck they didn’t have $750m but we had saved $250m in the stabilization fund with one oil filed but they have nothing in the stabilization fund with three oil fields. NPP has no excuse and nothing to blame after getting about $6billion including stabilization fund for covid. No matter how big the size of the crisis vis-à-vis the size of Ghana’s economy, $6billion is way too much in resolving covid so the government has no excuse blaming it’s failure on covid-19 or Russia- Ukraine war,” he stated.
