According to the latest Summary of Macroeconomic and Financial Data from the Bank of Ghana, when the total public debt is spread across the 30 million Ghanaian population, each person will be owing a staggering GHC 50,900 or approximately (US$ 9,000).
This is because the total public debt stock has hit GHC 263 billion currently.
Indeed, this year alone, the Akufo Addo added GHC 44 billion to the debt stock. This means this year alone, the government caused each of the 30 million Ghanaians to owe GHC 1,500.
The public debt was around GHC 220 billion as at the beginning of 2020, but by July 2020, the Akufo Addo/Bawumia administration had increased the debt overlay to GHC 263 billion.
The disturbing appetite of for debt by the Akufo Addo administration has caused Economist and Professor of Finance, Professor Godfred Alufar Bokpin to predict that Ghana will soon slip into the Highly Indebted Country (HIPC) category as its rampaging debt will exceed the threshold of 70 per cent Debt-to-GDP ratio by the end of 2020.
“We know that COVID-19 is playing a part in the debt build-up. From where I sit, by the end of the year, we will be doing more than 70% of the GDP as our debt stock. But I think it’s also obvious that government is taking advantage of the COVID-19 situation to spend in order to win over the electorates,” Prof. Bokpin told Accra-based CITI FM in an interview monitored by Whatsup News.
Comparatively this year has been a particularly trigger-happy one for the government as its accumulated debt pales those all previous years since independence.
Official data shows that the same period in the last few years, public debt stock was at GHC11 billion, GHC21.8 billion, and GHc28.9 billion in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 stood at GHs8.7 billion, respectively.
In the first seven months of 2020 however, the amount of new debt accumulated jumped to GHS43.5 billion, representing an increase of 19.8 per cent in the country’s debt stock from January to July.
This compares to an increase of 16.4 per cent in the country’s total debt stock in the same period in the year 2019.
The significant increases on all fronts have pushed Ghana’s debt to GDP ratio to 68.3 per cent, the highest level in more than a year.
Earlier this year, a Former Finance Minister, Seth Terkper, debunked the government’s claim that its accumulation of debt was due to COVID-19, saying the Akufo Addo administration had deliberately discontinued measures put in place by the erstwhile government to check overspending.