IMF programme: Corruption not the main cause of Ghana’s problems – Kwesi Pratt

Seasoned Journalist, Kwesi Pratt says corruption is not the cause of Ghana’s problems.

As the nation returns to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) despite calls on the President not to consider such move, especially when he promised Ghanaians he wouldn’t take that route, government officials and members of the governing New Patriotic Party(NPP) have begun to build a defence for this decision.

According to Minister of Information, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, the Akufo-Addo government is going to the IMF for a “balance of payment” support, therefore shot down arguments that the President and the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) should apologize for deceiving Ghanaians as they berated the previous Mahama government for doing same.

The Minister argued that the former President John Mahama and his government went to the IMF because they had messed up the economy, but President Nana Akufo-Addo is going for a bailout due to external factors; referring to the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine/Russia war among others.

” . . when the country was handed over to former President Mahama, there was no external global crisis. It was his own domestic management but at the end, he said to us that they have chewed the meat to the bone, so they are going to the Fund for bailout.

“This is his words, not mine. What tended up happening is that when they went for the bailout and we came into power, from 2017 to 2019, we saw how the Ghanaian economy performed.

“Today, our economic state has called for us to also go for bailout but it’s a different scenario. It’s not our internal domestic management that is the cause but the external issues and external pressures that have necessitated our decision to go for this facility,” he said in an interview on Peace FM’s “Kokrokoo” Monday morning.

Contributing to the Tuesday edition of ‘Kokrokoo’ programme, Kwesi Pratt spoke against the IMF bailout saying the government should spare Ghanaians the stories about external factors affecting Ghana so bad that the government must resort to the IMF.

“Did the external factors jump over Togo, Burkina Faso and La Cote D’Ivoire to affect Ghana alone? . . . How is that possible?”, he queried.

He also opposed the notion in the minds of Ghanaians that the country’s progress is crawling because of corruption.

To him, he doesn’t believe “corruption is the cause of what we are facing today”.

He stressed; “Corruption is a problem, no doubt but it is not the main cause of the problems we are facing today”.

Mr. Pratt stated emphatically that “the problems we are facing today are a structural economic problems; fundamental structural economic problems”.