Franklin Cudjoe suggests looking within to meet IMF conditionalities

President of Imani-Africa, Franklin Cudjoe, says it is important for the government to look internally and find ways to meet the IMF condition without burdening individual bondholders. He said even though the government is saying Ghanaians should share the burden, its own 2023 budget is the opposite of what it is preaching.

"I would rather like to look at the internal environment.

"Look as we speak, the budget that has been presented to the state, which seems to have been approved, makes room for some exceptionally physical experiments. We are talking almost 27 billion Ghana cedis, which is supposed to go into some capital investment, and of course, about 22 or so billion for miscellaneous. Yes, people may argue that part of that miscellaneous figure is to cater for interest payments and what have you, but you see, when you are in a hole, you don’t dig further.

"We submit that if you can take a closer look at that 27 billion Ghana cedis figure, you’d realise that the government could have made some significant savings by staying on certain projects.

"If you are in a hole, you don’t expand your spending in such a way that people will look on and say that you probably are not interested in the burden sharing as well. Why are you asking everybody else to burden share and probably disproportionately burden share by probably assuming close to 60/70 per cent of the debt and you are just assuming just about 30/40 per cent?

"In other jurisdictions where this exchange has been done, this Debt Exchange Program has been done, you don’t see this disproportionate burden sharing. So we submit that the government should look internally, scale back on some of these monstrous projects that have been over capitalised and then find ways and means of saving the Debt Exchange Program,” according to the President of Imani-Africa.