Covid-19 Give Ken Ofori-Atta Excuse To Put Ghana Back In IMF Grips

The Akufo Addo administration has gone “crying” back to the Bretton Woods institutions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to raise the needed funds to the economy, following what Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta described as the negative impact of the raging coronavirus disease.

“Analysis by the Ministry of Finance shows that the coronavirus will impact negatively on petroleum receipts due to the collapse of international crude oil prices, customs receipts, other receipts, expenditures and financing conditions on the fiscal front,” the Finance Minister told the Ghanaian Parliament on Tuesday.

The Finance Minister virtually admitted that Ghana is helpless in the resultant funding gap that may be caused by the global impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. He did not state how much the funding gap would be recorded.

The Akufo Addo administration was extremely critical of the previous administration of the then-ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) which sourced the IMF’s help for some US$1 billion in 2015.

By April 2019, the Akufo Addo announced that it had weaned itself off the strings of the IMF/World Bank. Indeed, the Finance Minister vowed not to return to the IMF for help. In less than one year after the widely publicised exit, the Finance Minister is proposing a return.

Critics have questioned the rational of the government going cup-in-hands back to the IMF/World bank for support when the government is already committing huge funds into questionable expenditures, such as the potential US$ 150 million for a new voters register by the Electoral Commission (EC), despite the fact that experts have vehemently argued that that expenditure is needless.

The government is also providing as much as US$30 million to construct a National Cathedral which will become useless because coronavirus has impacted on the tourists the government claim will visit the Cathedral.

The Akufo Addo administration appear to have been thrown into a state of hysteria by the incidence of the Covid-19 recorded in Ghana.

So far, about 7 residents in Ghana have been officially declared as Covid-19 positive and some 300 potential patients are still walking freely among the populace with the highly contagious super-flu virus.

Globally, over 208,000 have been infected with more than 8,000 deaths recorded so far.