The CEO of the IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, Franklin Cudjoe, has accused Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of failing to build upon the strong foundation built by his predecessor, John Dramani Mahama.
According to Cudjoe, the failure of the Akufo-Addo administration to build on the successes the previous government chalked is the reason for the current challenges in the country and not the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war as the government has been asserting.
Speaking in a Metro TV interview as quoted by GhanaWeb, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of IMANI added that the COVID-19 pandemic only revealed the weakness in Ghana’s economy.
“(The hardship we are experiencing today) is not necessarily because of the Russia-Ukraine war. What the Russian-Ukrainian war did to us was to expose the vacuousness of the argument that we have built a solid economy. Because even though we grow by 7 percent, this growth was largely on paper. I mean, if the growth had been real, we shouldn’t be suffering the effects we are suffering or we keep suffering.
“There is often less emphasis on John Mahama’s contribution to the economy’s growing in 2017, 2018 (and) to a large extent, 2019. The investments he (Mahama) made in energy, even though we chided him, stabilising the power supply before this government took over was significant enough. Because if you think that energy is one of the root causes of the global challenges, we already were saved electricity-wise because of the investment Mahama made.
“The point I am making is that a lot of the growth we had in 2017, 2018 (and) to a large extent, 2019 were due to John Mahama’s investment. What we did not do was to protect those investments with sensible policies and sensible projects. We spent a lot in 2020 – in the election we spent so much – but even before the 2020 election we spent so much on nebulous projects supervised by the Ministry of Special Initiatives,” he said.