Vice President Bawumia is touting his government’s supposed stem of depreciation again, after earlier claims had exploded in the face of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP).
In an encore that has got many already lambasting him for deception, Dr. Bawumia told Accra based Joy FM that his government has so well managed Ghana’s Economy that as part of the fruitage of effort, depreciation has been arrested while many jobs have been created.
“We have arrested the depreciation of the cedi, brought down inflation, we have brought down the interest rate, we have increased growth, reduced unemployment reduced the suffering of the people in terms of paying for electricity and created many jobs,” he stated.
According to him, his government has comparatively managed the economy far better than the predecessor NDC government.
The NPP government, he said, has specifically reduced inflation by 50% compared to the NDC.
“I think that fundamentally we have managed the cedi much better by all account. We did arrest the runaway depreciation in the cedi and therefore if you look at the record in terms of the depreciation of the cedi in the last four, five years or eight years, we will see that since the NPP government came to power, the rate of the cedi depreciation is 50% less than what it was before. That is what the data shows, so it’s 50% less,“ said the Vice President.
The Vice President claimed that even though the coronavirus pandemic has been challenging, the government’s handling of it has ensured that the economy is not thrown out of gear.
These claims are bound to elicit replies from the opposition NDC but even before the NDC would respond, people have been responding to his claims. On social media, people who have been calling him a liar include very angry commentators who say they are unemployed because of the Government collapsed their banks.
This is not the first time Dr. Bawumia has claimed that his government has arrested the depreciation of the cedi. In April 2017, he made the grandiloquent claim that the cedi has been arrested and detained with the key to the cells handed over to the IGP.
However, not long after that claim, the cedi depreciated badly against the dollar which is the main trading currency, causing the Bank of Ghana to push millions of dollars into the system to achieve some temporal stability.
Even so, the cedi has continued to slip against the dollar.