IMF’s $3bn bailout was poorly negotiated – Isaac Adongo

The Member of Parliament for the Bolgatanga Central constituency in the Upper East Region, Isaac Adongo, has intimated that the $3 billion credit facility between Ghana and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was poorly negotiated by Ghana’s representatives.

Mr. Adongo said the press release of the Fund announcing the approval of the credit facility shows the poor work done by the Finance Minister on behalf of Ghana.

Speaking on Eyewitness News on Citi FM, the Bolgatanga Central lawmaker said “When you read the IMF release, you will know that this programme was poorly negotiated. The Finance Minister was roaming the corridors of the IMF and the corridors of the Paris Club just to get this programme through.

“You cannot tell anybody what was the government programme and what was on the table, there was nothing like that, and so we ended up with IMF designing a programme and giving it to us because we just didn’t have any direction and the issues that have been raised in that document are so daring that I tend to say that we are in a very, very difficult situation.”

“This is the first time we have been to the IMF basically not being compliant with the debt sustainability situation of the IMF and the IMF’s own report in the early paragraph makes it very clear that COVID-19 took advantage of pre-existing vulnerabilities of the economy and that it wasn’t COVID-19 that was the problem but just that at the time COVID-19 came, we were suffering from heightened fiscal and external vulnerabilities and these were matters we had raised for a very long time and they [government] didn’t work with them until COVID-19 came and took advantage of these vulnerabilities,” Mr. Adongo added.

The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Wednesday, May 17 granted approval for Ghana’s $3 billion bailout request, aimed at revitalizing the country’s struggling economy after several months of negotiations.

Source: citifmonline