Former President John Dramani Mahama has called on the government to rally the country together to overcome present economic challenges.
According to him, everyone needs to come on board to salvage what he described as a “terrible economy”.
Mr. Mahama made the point when the National Executives of the Ghana Journalists Association, GJA led by its President Albert Dwumfour paid a courtesy call on him at his Office on Friday, October 21, 2022.
The purpose of the visit was to re-introduce the newly elected Executives and re-engage, among others.
“Let me say that the current state of our economy is terrible. We have never in all our history been at a place like this, and I think that it’s the role of GJA and all journalists to be even more vigilant at this time when the country is faced with economic challenges. We all need to come on board and see how we can salvage it. In circumstances like this national crisis, what you do is you rally the country together so that everybody comes on board to support us in getting out of the crisis,” John Mahama stated when addressing issues of national concern.
The former President accused the Finance Minister of hiding liabilities and painting a rosy picture.
“We raised this red flag that the direction in which the economy was going was going to crash. I talked personally about creative accounting and this Finance Minister was hiding huge liabilities and giving a rosy picture of the economy showing a good deficit, and I accused him of creative accounting, and here we are, the chickens have come home to roost. Now all those liabilities he was hiding under the carpet, you have to bring out in a debt sustainability analysis. The economy is in danger of crushing if we don’t get an IMF program.”
Government has outlined measures to ease economic challenges and return the economy to high rates of growth. But Mr. Mahama says the government should come clean on the state of the economy.
“The first step is that the government should come clean and tell us what is the state of the economy. You must put everything on the table. How to even survive untill that IMF program is going to be very difficult. Even at the time we were raising the red flag about the economy, they said the economy was robust. If your ship is sinking and ships are passing by and say ‘do you have any trouble, can we help you?’ you say no our economy is fine, you will sink. And that is what has happened, we have come to the reality of the situation.”
He also called for a national stakeholders meeting to discuss ideas to revive the economy.
“And that’s why I called for a national dialogue. I said bring the best brains together. I have been President before, it served me well. I called Senchi Economic Forum. It didn’t reduce my stature as President. All participants came except NPP. They boycotted that forum, but, it got us a very good home-grown document, which eventually is what we took to the IMF. So, by the time we were knocking on the doors of the IMF, we had our program ready. These people have gone to the IMF, not ready, no program, nothing. It’s only now that they have been able to put some program together. Government must act as quickly as possible because the slippery slope down which we are going, if action is not taken quickly, it will be catastrophic for all of us’’.
