Former Deputy Finance Minister and Member of Parliament for Obuasi West, Kwaku Kwarteng, has admitted that the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) biggest failure in government was excessive spending without implementing the reforms needed to generate sustainable revenue.
“I think the biggest mistake we made in government was spending without doing the necessary reforms that would have generated the revenue to meet the expenditures we wanted to do,” Mr Kwarteng said.
Speaking in an interview on JoyNews’ AM Show on Thursday, January 8, he acknowledged that the party failed to address long-standing weaknesses in Ghana’s economic management.
According to him, the NPP inherited a fragile economy when it took office in 2017.
“We inherited an economy in 2017 that was already under an IMF programme. Under those circumstances, you are supposed to be very prudent and move slowly.”
However, he said the government proceeded to introduce several interventions without adequate revenue backing.
“We proceeded to deploy a whole lot of interventions that our revenues could not support. We were always going to get here.”
Mr Kwarteng dismissed claims that Ghana’s economic crisis was largely caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I don’t think it was just COVID that broke the back of our economy. It was decades of economic management misbehaviour, post-independence. We spend money we do not have.”
He admitted that the NPP administration failed to reverse this trend.
“The NPP administration coming in 2017 failed to address this,” he said.
According to him, weak economic fundamentals left the country more exposed when COVID-19 struck.
“That is the reason when COVID came, some countries survived it better than we did, because their fundamentals were stronger.”
Mr Kwarteng urged the current government to draw a clear line and change course.
“This government must step up and say, this is where we draw the line. You cannot live your life on borrowed money and hope that somehow Ghana will become a developed country. That is a lie.”
“We must face this and have those frontal discussions and have the courage to do the political reforms that would give Ghana a real future,” he added.
However, he expressed concern about the lack of decisive action so far.
“As things stand now, I am not hopeful. I see a lot of the wrong practices, wasteful expenditure, and I don’t see the steps being taken. There are many expenditures that could be cut. Go and look at our travel budget. We are going on trips and conferences while we have not paid the electricity bill of Parliament. Is that how you run a country?”
Mr Kwarteng warned that the current administration risks repeating past mistakes.
“This government is walking the same path that previous governments have walked,” he said, referring also to the early period of the first Mahama administration. “It is always, let us borrow to finance our over-expenditure this year and borrow again to pay back old debts.”
He concluded that while recent economic stability deserves some recognition, deeper structural problems remain unresolved.
“As we commend the government for the stability we are seeing now, the fundamentals are still very weak. I am not seeing the bold initiatives needed to assure us that we will not end up here again.”
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