President Akufo-Addo has admitted that a recovery for the country’s economy will be painfully hard and slow.
He said this while giving a belated State of the Nation Address on Wednesday.
“The road to recovery will be hard and long, Mr. Speaker, but we have started on a good footing by accepting that we are in a difficult place and are taking the difficult decisions that will get us out,” he said.
The President also called on Ghanaians for their support saying the challenges cannot be solved by any one person or government.
“Mr. Speaker, there are many problems and we have to overcome them to get back to where we ought to be. I need your support; no President, no government could undertake this all by themselves; I need all Ghanaians to pull and push together,” he added.
The country’s economy is in a mess after unbridled borrowing by the Akufo-Addo government spiked debt and dented the creditworthiness of Ghana.
As a result, money market investors have shied away from lending to Ghana and would probably lend only at extremely high interest.
The knock-on effect is that foreign exchange is becoming scarce for the largely import economy with a knock-on effect manifesting in the form of spikes in inflation, rapid depreciation of the cedi and general hardships.
But Mr. Akufo-Addo who has been shifting blame to COVID-19, as usual, claimed that the problems of the economy are the effects of COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine.
According to him, the government was on the path of significant progress and development until the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
He said many actions that have been taken by the government since taking office in 2017 have begun to bear fruit, putting Ghana on the path of prosperity between 2017 and 2020.
“Then COVID rose. This is not something that anyone could have planned for, and the consequences are there for us all to see around the world. The economic devastation of COVID has since the beginning of the year been further aggravated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has worsened the economic outlook of the entire world, and we in Ghana have not escaped this development,” he said in his speech in Parliament.
This claim by the Ghanaian President however has not impressed experts, including World Bank Country Director, Frank Laporte, who has said candor about the causes of the economic challenges is important and that the challenges had begun even before COVID-19.