An Economist and Lecturer with the CK-T- UTAS, Bismarck Osei has said the President’s admission that the country’s economy was already having challenges even before the advent of Covid 19 was the honest truth.
According to Mr. Osei, the country’s economy even before the outbreak of Covid 19 was not very positive as about 36% of its tax revenue was used to service interest rates that were due it as a result of borrowing from both local and international lending organisations.
“Yes, you can say that some of the things he mentioned concerning the economy that we were having problems before this Russia and Ukraine war came in were true. Even before Covid-19, we had our own problems we were going through. If you look at the amount, we use about 36% of our tax revenue to pay interest rates, we were going through a crisis before these things came to exacerbate it” He revealed.
The Economist disagreed strongly with the President’s assertion during the State of Nation’s Address that Ghc 17.1b was expended on Covid-19 expenditure. He insisted that the claim was completely outrageous.
“Some of these expenditures, he [the President] spoke on Covid-19, I think, are very astronomical. Ghc 17.7 Billion? We were in Accra then. How many people did they feed there? They only fed some people at Circle, the squatters; it wasn’t so much I don’t think it was more than a hundred thousand people,” he stated.
Commenting on the government’s claim of spending Ghc 1.7B on teachers during the peak of the COVID-19, he quizzed, “which teachers were being trained, I don’t know where the government said it trained teachers because some of these government teachers were in the house waiting for the Covid 19 restrictions to be eased and they will go back, so these figures need a lot of scrutiny”.
Also, commenting on how the country’s economy has been hit hard by the Russia – Ukraine invasion, Mr. Bismarck Osei agreed with the President explaining that, considering Russia and Ukraine net export figures then it is only obvious that a cut in its export will have damning repercussion on the global economy of which Ghana is not an exception.
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