The 2023 Budget Statement and the Economic Policy for 2023 may not be ready on November 15, as scheduled due to ongoing negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Majority Leader, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu has said.
The Public Financial Management Act provides that the following year’s budget is read in mid-November of the current year.
However, addressing members of the Parliamentary Press Corps at Parliament House on Thursday, he stated “Discussions that are going on now involving the IMF, I think is going to take a bit of a while, my understanding is that it will go into the first few days of next week, if that is the case we then have to strand out the conclusions and factor them into the budget, after we have succeeded in doing that for government, it will have to go to Cabinet for some discussions, integration and additions and subtractions, before it comes ultimately to parliament, so I believe it is going to be quite difficult to submit to the 15 deadline, I am just conjecturing but if you want to do a tidy work maybe you will be required to have some space to be able to do a tidy work.
As we all know, these are not normal times and we want to do a tidy job in order to reposition the country, nothing should be done which will eventually become wishy washy, we want to have the best to be able to uplift us from where we are as a country.”
Further he explained “The presentation should be on 30th of November, so it will not be in breach but we ourselves brought it forward to 15th November because we want more time to interrogate the principles underpinning the budget, indeed Ghana belongs to the IPU and as a body of parliament, it has taken the position that parliament should work towards having presentation of budget for consideration and passage at least eight weeks before the beginning of the next succeeding financial year.
And that is why we said -let’s bring it to 15 of November, that will give us about six weeks, instead of the four weeks the constitution stipulates, so that is the consideration, but I will have some discussions with the minister to enable us know when the budget will be coming to parliament.”
Ghana’s government is in talks over a loan of about $3bn from the International Monetary Fund.
The Finance Ministry said the government and the lender are committed to reaching an agreement on a framework and policies for an IMF-backed program “as soon as feasible,” according to statement.
The country is under pressure to reverse an economic slide that rolls back recent gains that had seen the country rated as one of the world’s fastest growing markets.