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Sammy Gyamfi, the NDC’s national communications director, has refuted claims made by the IMF and the NPP’s government that the COVID-19 pandemic is to blame for the country’s current economic difficulties.
He claims that Ghana’s economy was already in trouble before COVID-19 and that Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia’s Economic Management Team was to blame for the country’s currency weakening by approximately 13 percent in 2019.
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) spokesman stated, in an interview with Joy News that GhanaWeb was watching, that the COVID-19 outbreak really helped stabilize the Ghana Cedi because it reduced imports and, consequently, the need for dollars.
“How can any objective mind blame the alarming depression of the cedi on COVID-19 when we know that the main reason for the alarming depreciation in the cedi is the huge capital fight from our country? Investors are pulling out their monies. Why are they pulling out? It is because our debt position is no longer sustainable. That is why we have been downgraded by all the sovereign credit rating agencies … to junk status; our economy is now a ‘borla’ economy.
“In 2019, the cedi had depreciated by 12.9 percent; that was before COVID. In 2016 if you want to use the Mahama era as a benchmark, the cedi depreciated by 9.6 percent, but even before COVID, we were doing depreciation of almost 13 percent.
“COVID rather helped the situation because it reduced demand for dollars in 2020, so you realise that the cedi was relatively stronger in 2020 and in 2021. Immediately that fizzled out, we saw the cedi depreciating again, and as we speak, the cedi has depreciated by over 30 percent for this year 2022 alone,”he said.
NKONKONSA.com
