Dubious Akufo-Addo Gov’t Finally Forced To Show All of Ghana’s Debts To IMF …Public Debt At Almost 100%, Unfit For Capital Market

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The Akufo-Addo government has finally acquiesced to common sense and tallied all of Ghana’s public debt into one basket, showing that the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is almost 100%.

Earlier, the crooked Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta had compartmentalized public debt to hide its true state and had been showing a window-dressed version that left out the energy sector debts in financial reports.

According to former deputy Minister of Finance, Casiel Ato Forson, the reckoning hit during negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

“After calling the minority names because I insisted they add ESLA and GETFund bonds plus cocoa bills and Sinohydro to the public debt, govt has finally agreed as part of the IMF negotiations to add all of them!” revealed Hon. Ato Casiel in a tweet.

He points out that this means Ghana’s debt is now about 100% of GDP.

“Our public debt to GDP is now about 100%. Our debt is definitely unsustainable making the debt restructuring unavoidable!”

Even before the commonsense would prevail, Ghana’s supposed public debt as of July was Ghc393.4billion which the government claimed was 78.3% of GDP.

For a long time, the government had been reporting the country’s debt based on strange calculations in which energy sector debts in particular were exempted.

The Minority had often fought this kind of strange voodoo and urged the government to call a spade a spade, but the government had insisted on calling these huge debts anything else but debt, so that the country’s debt problem looked better than it really was.

However, according to Dr. Ato Casiel, the government has now succumbed to commonsense at last and the country must now prepare for debt restructuring.

Meanwhile, the “incompetent” Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta has grudgingly admitted that the unsustainable levels of the country’s debt and the massive downgrades by international rating agencies make it impossible for Ghana to seek any sort of financing from the international capital market because Ghana’s credit rating is super-high-risk and no investor would want to trust their funds to the economy.

“Returning to the international capital market is going to take a bit of time. It will take about two to three years before we can be able to work on our ratings …the recent downgrade [credit ratings] is very unfortunate,” the tone-deaf Ken Ofori-Atta blurted.

Earlier, critics had warned the Akufo Addo administration about this possibility when it was rampantly racking up debt and squandering it with corruption and mismanagement.