Deputy Minister-designate for Trade and Industry has challenged the Minority National Democratic Congress (NDC) in Parliament to dispense with the political gimmick and support the government to successfully implement the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP).
He warned that this is not the time to demonstrate a high level of unconscious incompetence because they refuse to understand the prevailing situation, stressing this is very bad.
Politicking and propaganda in the name of securing political power, he said, will not benefit the country and assured the government is not sleeping on the job.
Hon. Stephen Amoah offered the advice on Thursday when contributing to the statement on the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme presented to Parliament by the Minister of Finance Ken Ofori-Atta.
He stated that nobody in government is happy with what is happening including members of the opposition NDC because they are all aware of the situation the country finds itself in.
According to him, one of the best fiscal reforms to adopt is an exchange of bonds with high debts with low ones and cited Jamaica, Uruguay, the UK, Greece, and Argentina as examples of countries that adopted this global policy.
The Trade Minister-designate argued that Ghana finds itself in the present predicament because of high-interest rate payments that started in 2012 and increased significantly in 2016.
He said, “It started reducing up to 2018, 2019 then we had this global crisis that put up an uncontrollable situation such that for about 21 months we were going through impaired productivity in our country.”
“We were not going to work but were being paid; from where? The private sector had to sack about 40,000 people who were payees of corporate taxes.”
“We had shortfalls in revenue generations of over GH¢12 billion. The government could not perform its statutory obligation and resorted to debt financing because revenue generation domestically was an uncontrollable situation.”
Stephen Amoah blamed the challenges of the country on the Minority and argued because of the seeming balance in the Parliament, disagreements sparked by the Minority on revenue generation reforms eroded investor confidence leading to a situation where the government could not even assess the private sector to perform over ten billion bills a year.
“We all contributed to this apart from the global situations but I can assure Ghanaians that if they will be patient with us; there are a few challenges in rolling out the implementation of the DDEP but as good managers of the economy if they agree with what we are doing today, in the near future to the long term, they will be happy with this government.”
