The centre is also of the view that Ghana needs to improve on her public spending habits, a situation the centre said was currently causing the country a huge developmental gap.
“We need to encourage efficiency in managing public funds. People should not be paid money they did not work for, Dr Joe Abbey, the Executive Director of the CEPA said and added that Ghana could have grown at seven per cent per annum instead of the four per cent, if we had reached the efficiency level of Uganda”.
Dr Abbey was speaking to the Daily Graphic after briefing journalists on the economic history and current status of the nation.
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| Dr Joe Abbey, Executive Director of the CePA |
“We at CEPA are happy that Ghana has finally started drilling oil. That excitement would, however be short-lived if revenues to be accrued from the said oil is not used to enhance the economic and intellectual well-being of the Ghanaian to help him/her take the economy of this country to where we all want it to be.
According to him, the Ghana’s Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) that was initiated around the 1980s and was touted as one of the effective tools that returned the country to sound economic footing, “was evidence that the Ghanaian can bail this nation out of any economic mess.
“That programme was home-grown and it took Ghana out of the then economic troubles that the country was going through prior to its implementation”, the CEPA Executive Director said and discounted claims that the ERP was initiated for Ghana by her then development partners.
Dr Abbey was also not impressed with the country’s resort to a borrowing spree, a situation he insisted could have dire consequences for the economy if not checked.
“It is good to go for funds, to borrow money for development but what happens if that money is not paid back in time”, he asked and further wondered if the current public debt was not enough to signal Ghana’s economic managers against further borrowings.
The CePA Executive Director was of the view that a precise fund disbursing and repayment strategy needed to be formulated to help Ghana properly utilise her borrowed funds and also enable her pay back those loans in time.
“A lot of the debt loans that were cleared by the HIPC initiative were as old as 40 years. Most of them had 15 years grace periods with interest rates as low as 0.5 per cent yet we could not pay back. All we concentrated on was borrowing and not repayment. So what is the guarantee that we will be able to pay back most of these loans that we are currently happily taking”, he asked.
Dr Abbey would, however, not state if Ghana should cut-off borrowing and rely on revenues from the just-started oil except to say “we need to expedite action on what we borrow and what we use that borrowed funds for”.
The visit to the Centre’s offices in Accra formed part of an initiative by El de De Consults aimed at training selected journalists on the basics of financial and economic reporting.
The ten day-training session is christened “Finance and economic clinic for journalists” and is the second in a series of its kind by the consultancy firm.
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