IMF not forcing us to do what must be done – Mahama

President John Mahama has said the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is not forcing Ghana to do what the country knows it has to do to rescue its ailing economy.

“What I find comforting is that a lot of the things that the IMF see as challenges, we ourselves have identified as challenges,” Mahama told Aljazeera in an interview aired Sunday night.

Ghana is currently in talks with the Bretton Wood institution for a three-year programme to help rescue the world’s second biggest cocoa producer from its economic crisis, which saw the local currency–Cedi–fall by about 40 percent vis-à-vis the Dollar and other major currencies of international trade.

The Government rolled out a set of austerity measures amid the crisis to control the situation.

Key among them were a freeze on public sector wage increases, the placement of a cap on public sector employment, as well as the removal of subsidies on some fuel products.

Ghana, according to Alex Mould, former Chief Executive Officer of the National Petroleum Authority, spent Ghc450 million on fuel subsidies, alone, in 2011. The subsidies were scrapped when the local currency plummeted coupled with a rise in crude prices on the world market.

Explaining how the Ghanaian Government and the IMF are on the same page concerning the ongoing austerity measures, President Mahama said: “We had a problem with the wage bill, we had a problem with reducing government expenditure and increasing revenue: those are things that we had identified ourselves and so indeed we are speaking the same language in terms of agreeing what the benchmarks that we must meet are because we believe that its healthy for our own economy.”

“It’s not the IMF forcing us to do what we have to do,” he said.



Source: Ghana/StarrFMonline.com/103.5fm