Government Spent More On COVID-19 Than Grants Received – John Boadu

The General Secretary of the New Patriotic Party, John Boadu, has said the government lost huge sums of money to COVID-19 compared to what it received from donors.

Speaking to Nana Aba Anamoah on Starr Chat Wednesday, Mr. Boadu disclosed that the figures available make the government vulnerable adding that the government still incurs costs due to the pandemic.

According to him, the issues of COVID come in two dimensions but comparatively the amount of revenue lost and expenditure of the government outweigh donations from the IMF and others.

“The effect of COVID was higher and bigger, for instance, if you take revenue shortfall in the year 2020 was close to fourteen billion Ghana cedis. As a result of non-collection of import duties and all that. If you take COVID expenditure alone this is an extraneous item. Because without COVID we have nothing like that as part of our expenditure for the year.

“So the combination of just that two in the year 2020 alone is twenty-four billion Ghana cedis, put together all the monies that we got as a result of a donation from IMF and all those places does it amount to twenty-four billion, it is not.”

The NPP General Secretary, however, added that Ghanaians have every right to demand accountability but there are institutions mandated to expose any issue on the government expenses.

“The negative effect is enormously more than the direct positive effect. The indirect effect is also huge the government lost a lot of revenue and it continues to lose as we speak now. So there is no argument at all as to the impact of COVID on the entire economy.

“I am talking about the government but go to the departments and agencies the cost of running their businesses and all that. But that is not to say that Ghanaians should not be asking about the nitty-gritty of the expenses. It will come there, as I told you Public Accounts Committee or the Auditor General at the end of the year they will have the opportunity to go through,” he reiterated.