Franklin Cudjoe to Gov’t: Eat Humble Pie and Run To IMF for Bailout

President of IMANI Africa, Franklin Cudjoe, is advising the Akufo-Addo government to swallow its pride and turn to the IMF for yet another bailout for the financial mess that the government has plunged the country into.

In a Facebook post on Monday, Mr. Cudjoe repeated Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia’s famous maxim that “if the fundamentals are weak, the exchange rate will expose you.”

In his post, Cudjoe said: “We need to stop the debt clock by rationalising our expenditure plans and more… Meanwhile, the government should talk to the IMF to help. We shouldn’t be shy at all.”

The Akufo-Addo government however has every reason to be shy, because while in opposition, it had boycotted a conference that the Mills government had put together to flesh out homegrown policies to be presented to the IMF for funding. The NPP had said the Mills government was incompetent and that was why it was seeking help from IMF.

After it had come to power, it had promised that an IMF program that the government was pursuing would be the last one ever that Ghana would pursue with President Akufo-Addo grandiloquently promising to move the country from taxation to production.

However, the Akufo Addo administration had gone to the IMF/ World Bank twice for bailouts grossing almost US$ 2 billion; one to shore up its debt position and the other an SOS over the COVID-19 pandemic.

Five years after coming into office, the country’s debt is out of control with the IMF and World Bank fixing the debt to GDP ratio at some 81%. The Akufo-Addo government has responded by claiming the debt to GDP ratio is rather in the 70s; basically, the government is now juggling the debt to GDP ratio figures.

For many, the straw that broke the camel’s back was when rating agency Fitch downgraded Ghana’s creditworthiness to B-, meaning investors are not willing to risk their money with Ghana.