The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has called on the Special Prosecutor to probe all Ministers and public officials of the Akufo-Addo administration cited in the Auditor-General’s report on the government’s COVId-19 expenditures.
While the Special Prosecutor is investigating the matter, the NDC is demanding President Nana Akufo-Addo immediately fire the Minister of Finance Ken Ofori-Atta, Health Minister Kweku Agyemang Manu, Minister of Information Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, the CEO of the National Buffer Stock Company and all those cited in the report for violating the laws in their expenditure of the COVID funds.
National Communications Officer of the NDC, Sammy Gyamfi, who made these demands at a press conference on Wednesday, February 1 also called on the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament (PAC) to expedite its public hearings on the Special Audit Report into the COVID-19 expenditures.
He urged Parliament to compel the Auditor-General to exercise his power of surcharge and disallowance to retrieve all COVID-19 funds that have been misapplied and misused through various infractions and veritable acts of criminality.
The Auditor-General released its report on the government’s COVID-19 expenditures covering the period from March 2020 to June 2022, which has raised a lot of eyebrows.
According to the National Communications Officer, despite attempts to conceal the naked corruption from Ghanaians, the report still reveals jaw-dropping details of how various officials and assigns of the government misapplied, misused and willfully looted the unprecedented resource envelope that accrued to the NPP-Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government for the management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The Auditor-General’s report reveals that, by the kind courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ghana benefitted immensely from the unprecedented inflow of funds from various sources, such as the World Bank, the International Monitory Fund, the Africa Development Bank, the European Union, the Contingency Fund and the sale of BOG-COVID-19 Bonds among others. These funds, the report estimates to amount to a total of GH¢21,844,189,185.24.”
“We must emphasize here that this amount excludes other COVID-related funds such as the $1 Billion facility from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), being Ghana’s share of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) to boost post-COVID economic recovery of member countries. The Auditor-General’s estimate also excludes the over GH¢62 million that accrued to the COVID-19 Trust Fund which was established by an Act of Parliament to help mobilize funds to complement the government’s fight against the pandemic.”
“These notwithstanding, the report observed that out of the total amount of GH¢21.8 billion that accrued to the Government of Ghana, only GH¢11, 750,683,059.11 was spent on COVID-19 activities, while the rest of the money (precisely GH¢10, 093,506,126.13) was spent on so-called “budget support”. The animal called “budget support” as we would later realize was the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government’s euphemism for their reckless and wasteful election-driven expenses which resulted in an unprecedented budget deficit of 15.7% in the year 2020.”
Highlighting some of the revelations captured in the Report, Sammy Gyamfi lamented how the Ministry of Health paid $120.2 million to UNICEF for the supply of COVID-19 vaccines but only received vaccines valued at US$38,322,000.00, with a whopping $81.8 million of the transaction unaccounted for.
He said, “This raises serious concerns given the history of the current Minister of Health, under whose watch Ghana entered into the dubious Sputnik V vaccine contract and paid a colossal amount of money for vaccines which were never supplied.”
He described as intriguing how the Ministry paid GH¢10.4 million as a premium for Special Life Insurance coverage for 10,000 frontline health workers without detailing the relevant information of the beneficiaries.
According to him, this reckless misuse of the COVID-19 funds by the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government does not come as a surprise, given the fact that the insurance company that got 30% of the booty is Enterprise Insurance, a company closely associated with the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta.
He averred that while COVID-19 may have been a national health disaster for Ghana, it was a bonanza and an avenue for officials of the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government and the New Patriotic Party to engage in the most obscene plundering of state resources never seen before in Ghana’s history.
Sammy Gymafi stressed that in the face of this unpardonable and despicable raid on the public purse, there can be no justification whatsoever for the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government to attempt to indirectly impose a draconian debt exchange program on the Ghanaian people in order to clean a mess they and their cronies in government have created.
He argued it is therefore within the right of labour, trade unions, pensioners, individual bondholders, banks and other stakeholders to stand firmly against the brazen attempt to foist and impose unfavourable terms of a so-called domestic debt exchange program on them.