After a prolonged silence (at least to the local media), government has at last provided reasons for its decision to the extend the three-year International Monetary Fund (IMF) Credit Facility programme by another one year.
The government said it was persuaded by the IMF to extend the programme under threat that the international banker would immediately scrap the entire deal if Ghana’s government rejected the proposal.
Speaking to the media on Monday in Accra, Deputy Minister of Finance, Kwaku Kwarteng, said the IMF programme “had underperformed†and that the country would fail in meeting its objectives of signing up for the credit facility.
In his own words: “The IMF has been around for two years and they the IMF are now telling us that the programme has so under performed and so we should now extend itâ€.
{loadmodule mod_banners,nativeads}
He added that, the government, “didn’t think we [the country] needed that. So when we expressed that view to them… what we didn’t anticipate was the response we subsequently got from the IMF was that…if we do not extend then there is no way we were going to achieve the objectives of the programme so they will end the programme todayâ€.
Contrary to its 2016 Presidential campaign promise not to extend the programme on expiration in 2018 as well as its heavy criticism of the erstwhile President John Mahama led NDC administration for enrolling Ghana in the IMF credit scheme, the NPP government under the leadership President Akufo – Addo has agreed to arrangements that will extend the programme to April 2019.
The new agreement had IMF approve an additional US$94 million disbursement and consequently, a possible extension of the freeze on government/public sector employment: a development which has attracted considerable criticism from various quarters of the Ghanaian public.
{loadmodule mod_banners,nativeads}
In an effort to defend the government’s decision to extend the programme (or accept the proposal of the IMF as it claims), the Deputy Finance Minister said: “I for instance thought that from what we had told them that we did not want to come out of the programme as though there is a new government and government had abandoned the programme, it will send a wrong signal to the market and it will hurt our image as a credible country so we said we were not going to do thatâ€.
However, the eventual decision to extend the IMF programme only confirms already established arguments by some stakeholders in the Ghana’s economy that, it was practically impossible for the current administration to fund its massive development initiatives like the one-district-one-factory, the Free SHS, railway project, among others without considering the extension of the facility (at least for the next one year after its initial expiration date in 2018).