The Director of Research at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), Dr. John Kwakye has described it as an erroneous position to blame the current economic challenges on former President John Mahama.
According to him, though one cannot ignore the impact of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war, referring to a past government for the present hardship is not a comfortable position to base an economic argument on.
“I can grant some of them, the impact of Covid 19, and the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war. Of course, the NPP came to meet a challenging economic situation when it took over in January 2017.
“There were a lot of arrears, the energy sector arrears, arrears to contractors and then, of course, they implemented the financial sector bailouts which also brought the additional cost to the budget,” he disclosed on TV3.
He continued: “But we were in an IMF programme and then we exited from the programme, so one would have thought that when we exited at least we were in a pretty comfortable position that is why we exited. So I am not comfortable that we have to go back five and a half years and bring things that happened so many years ago to the present.”