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Former President John Mahama’s inappropriate remarks regarding the national debt stock under the Akufo-Addo administration have been addressed by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
describing it as inaccurate and a series of false statements made by the former president to dissuade Ghanaians from supporting the failed administration he oversaw in part between 2009 and 2017.
As part of his tour of the Kwahu Traditional and Municipal Area, President Akufo-Addo spoke to a group of stakeholders from all over the area on Wednesday, November 16, 2024. He stated that he would not hesitate to remind the one-term former president that Ghanaians do not have the forgetful memories he constantly thinks about and talks about.
President Akufo-Addo said, “This is the man whose rate of growth of the economy was the lowest the country has ever seen in 20 years, pegging at a paltry and abysmal 2.4 percent.” He was recalling the gloomy, dark days of John Mahama’s unstable power supply, when Ghanaians suffered the lowest period of growth.
“I heard John Mahama speak three days ago that the national debt has grown to unsustainable proportions,” the president added, addressing the group of Muslim clerics, clergymen, chiefs, and other important local stakeholders.
“He must know that it’s not everyone who forgets easily. In 2008, when President Mills took over the from President Kufuor, the national debt was 9 billion cedis, by the time they were leaving government, it was 120 billion. It was an increase of 1,233 percent.
Explaining further, he said, in 2016, when I came, it’s gone from 120 billion cedis to 767 billion cedis, that’s an increase of 539 percent. This is less than half of the rate of accumulation of the debt in his time.”
“To complete the calculation, in 2016 when he was exiting, 4 cedis to a dollar meant that 120 billion debt, was $30 billion,” President Akufo-Addo said, relating it to the currency rate. With the cedi set at 17 cedis to the dollar, it is currently worth 767 billion cedis, or 45 billion US dollars.
We had one that increased from 9 billion to 120 billion dollars. because it was one cedi to one dollar when he arrived. 9 billion to 30 billion dollars, a 21 billion dollar rise. That’s a 15 billion dollar rise when compared to a statistic that has increased from 30 billion to 45 billion dollars,” he said.
“It certainly not me. His performance is much worse than mine. Sometimes when they speak, we don’t investigate it to see where the truth is. Truth, which cannot certainly come from a man under whose regime we had the Graduate Unemployment Association.
Source: Ghanatodayonline.com
