Ghana’s economic challenges are due to prolonged recklessness and excessive borrowing but not the failure to adopt the US dollar as the nation’s currency, the Alliance for Social Equity and Public Accountability (ASEPA), has said.
The Alliance’s comments is in disagreement with a suggestion made by the Director of Research at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), Dr John Kwabena Kwakye.
Dr. Kwakye had suggested that Ghana needed to adopt the dollar as its currency in order to stabilise the economy.
But according to the Executive Director of ASEPA, Mensah Thompson, Ken Ofori-Atta, the former Finance Minister, President Akufo-Addo and Dr. Ernest Addison, Governor of the Bank of Ghana, should be blamed for the State’s unstable economy and not the currency in use.
“We are here not because our currency is not held in dollars, we are here because of the recklessness of Ken Ofori-Atta, the governor of the Central Bank and President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
“The root cause of our problem is recklessness, borrowing and people who just don’t understand simple economic management who implemented faze economic restructuring that has thrown the economy into a cyclic spiral now going back into a debt hole and the solution is not dollarisation,” he indicated.
He added that the decision to restructure Ghana’s domestic debt was a bad idea that placed a strain on the Cedi.
“I have always asked myself, why did the government, after all the recklessness of Ken Ofori-Atta, still decide that if they were going under a debt restructuring programme, Ken Ofori-Atta was the person they were going to allow to oversee that debt restructuring, I was surprised when he decided to restructure our domestic debt,” he said on Accra-based Citi TV Monday, May 13, 2024.
