Ken Thompson, the Chief Executive Officer of Dalex Finance while speaking at an event hosted by CIMG has indicated that, Ghana will have to stop borrowing considering the state of the economy.

He passed the comments at the event dubbed,  "Getting Ken Ofori-Atta To Face Up To Realities", Mr Thompson said Ghana's economy is in the current state it is because, “we spent almost 100 per cent of all our revenue including grants on three line items which he identified as, Compensation to employees, interest payments, and statutory payments e.g. GETFund, District Assemblies Common Fund, and NHIS".

In his delivery, He added that Ghana as a country had in 2017 spent over 100% of its revenue on the three items and therefore the other expenditure was catered for by borrowing monies.

“We are borrowing to fund consumption and not to fund investment. Our debt is piling up (70% of GDP), and, we may not be in a position to repay in the future. Even before then, any natural or man-made disaster could send us into a default tailspin of government obligations causing intolerable hardship, widespread business failures, and mass unemployment,” he stated.

In suggesting an alternative, he stated that, the taxes in the country should be increased to save the economy from collapsing.

He further indicated that,  “We are not likely to reduce our expenditure on salaries in the short term, and even though there has been some capping of statutory obligations the net effect is negligible. Our only hope is to increase revenue in the short to medium term in order to fund consumption expenditure. We must increase revenue as follows:

o Get the informal sector to start paying individual taxes

o Enforce evidence of tax payment on property registration e.g. vehicle registration, company registration, land title registration, etc.

o Increase taxes across board especially property taxes. That is our hope in the short term.

The only way we can sell this to the public is for the politicians to share in the pain e.g. stop the purchase of numerous Toyota Land Cruisers that cost over GHC 600,000 each.”

On his path, the solutions for the agricultural sector should not be part of the export and local consumption as well as providinf farmers with the needed support by improving seeds and methodology.

“The 1-Village, 1-Dam and Planting for Food and Jobs programmes are well conceived but the persons in charge of our Agriculture are unserious. They are claiming an impossible figure of 745,000 full time jobs created in 2017, claiming that the Army Fall Worm is defeated when even experts in our Ministry of Agriculture tell us it will be here for a long time”, he added.

Ghanaguardian.com