New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament for the Nhyiaeso Constituency, Dr. Stephen Amoah, has criticized government for its refusal to accept that the NPP made significant improvements to the economy before leaving power.
Delivering a statement on Parliament’s adoption of the Economy and Development Committee’s report, the MP said the then NPP government was very prudent in its management of the economy.
“The then government, prudent as it was, was able to manage the economy to the extent that by the time my brothers took over, our debt to GDP ratio had been reduced to 61.8 percent,” he said.
Dr. Amoah noted that the Finance Minister had himself acknowledged this, saying “this point was emphatically made by Dr. Ato Forson in his first budget statement to this House.”
He said that under the NPP government, inflation had reduced significantly while the country’s GDP rose even as the rest of the world suffered a major setback in growth due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The inflation rate had been reduced from 54.1 percent to 22.9 percent. GDP, from about 0.4 or 0.1 percent when the world grew by negative 3.3 percent, had grown to 5.6 percent before they took over higher than in 2016,” he stated.
He also argued that the NDC government had not done much to build resilient economic structures, saying nothing worth noting had been done to prove government’s ability to stand firm or do better than the previous government when a crisis hits.
“Resilience is an issue. Going forward, we’ve not done anything to show that in a similar crisis, you would not get worse results than the NPP government was able to achieve,” he added.
He further said the government had performed poorly on macroeconomic indicators, adding that no tangible policies had been implemented that would have had a tangible effect on the country over the past year.
“Now they want to borrow to pay for Free SHS. Now they want to borrow to do things that will not yield any sustainable results,” he added.