E-Levy Passage Will Not Prevent NPP From Going To IMF …Prof Gatsi

Dean of the School of Finance of the University of Cape Coast, Prof. John Gatsi has cautioned that after the theAkufo Addo administration has succeeded in pushing through the obnoxious Electronic Transaction Levy (E-Levy), there will be no guarantee that the government will not run to the IMF for a bailout.

According to Prof. Gatsi, the e-levy was simply extra leverage that the government wants.

Prof. Gatsi said this while being hosted on Hope FM in Ho, the Volta regional capital.

He said it is erroneous for President Akufo Addo and his appointees to think that the e-levy will be a panacea to all of the country’s fiscal problems.

Even with the e-levy, he said, the country will still deal with a deficit far above the ECOWAS benchmark of about 3%.

The Dean of Finance said the NPP looks all set to run to the IMF for a bailout but is looking for a convenient opportunity to blame either the previous NDC government or the Ghanaian people as an excuse to go for the bailout.

He pointed out that the NPP government in 2001 embraced the HIPC initiative packaged by the IMF and World Bank but blamed the previous government.

In 2017, the NPP government again inherited the extended credit facility (ECF) which the NDC had started with the IMF even though the NPP had boycotted the conference that the government had organized to device homegrown solutions to be presented to the IMF.

And when it inherited the program, the NPP as usual blamed the NDC but later extended the same program.

Again In 2020 and 2021 the government took US$1billion under the RCF and US$1billion SDR from the IMF due to COVID-19 but has failed to conduct COVID-19 expenditure audit.

Prof Gatsi said the job of the public and the opposition is to focus on their strategies to prevent the passage of the e-levy and that it is not strategic to be telling the government to go to the IMF. Prof. Gatsi said he will not fall into that trap to recommend to the government to engage their institutional friend, the IMF for a bailout as the government has already made up its mind and is looking for a justification.

Besides, he said, IMF programs of the past have not led to improvement in economic management – from 2017 to 2018, Ghana was under the IMF program but the fiscal control expected was not seen as the volume of borrowing was done as though we were not under an IMF program.