Coronavirus became a pretext for reckless election-related spending – John Mahama claims

• Former President John Mahama has been speaking on the economy

• He says the Akufo-Addo government is using the novel Coronavirus as a whipping boy to spend

• He lamented the growing rise in food prices in the country

The 2020 flagbearer of the main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress,

Read full article.target='_blank' href='/GhanaHomePage/people/person.php?ID=1176'>John Dramani Mahama, has said that the current government capitalized on the novel Coronavirus to spend recklessly during the 2020 elections.

According to him, while there is no doubt that the world has been harshly hit by the pandemic, in the particular instance of Ghana, the government has further depleted the resources of the country, using it as an excuse.

Describing their excuse as a “convenient whipping boy,” the former president explained that, it is the reason Ghana currently has its largest ever budget deficit.

“COVID-19 has become the convenient whipping boy and has been cited as the reason for the crisis we face now and the attendant economic hardships. Yes, COVID-19 affected the economy, and no one can dispute that. It is however not the main reason why we are in the current hole we find ourselves. COVID-19 only became a pretext for reckless election related spending, which produced the largest ever budget deficit in the recent economic history of Ghana last year,” he explained in a statement.

Speaking at ‘The State of Ghana’s Economy, The Score card’, organized by the National Democratic Congress’s The Professionals Forum (PROFORUM) in Accra, John Dramani Mahama lamented how the country’s economy has ballooned, affecting all goods and services.

“Our debt has ballooned to unsustainable levels- topping 80% of GDP- exposing us to very high risk of debt default. Almost all of our tax revenue is used to service our debt and the effect has been the introduction of several new taxes. This has led to rampant increments in the prices of goods and services. This is primarily responsible for the hardships Ghanaians are going through now,” he said.