Bawumia clarifies Ghana’s position on usage of Dollar

The Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, says Ghana is not against the use of the US Dollar in international transactions as reported by some leading trade agencies.

This comes on the back of government‘s announcement to use gold to buy oil on the commodity market instead of using the US Dollar.

He maintains the directive to use gold is to protect the local currency from the impact of depreciation.

Speaking at the AGI Awards night in Accra, Dr. Bawumia told industry players to disregard such misrepresentation.

“To address this fundamental challenge that we all face of depreciation and its impact on fuel and utility prices and food and so on, the government has opted to implement a policy of using our gold to buy oil products,” Dr. Bawumia said.

“If we implement it as we have envisioned, it will fundamentally change our balance of payment and significantly reduce the persistent deprecation of our currency,” he added.

“This has been misrepresented as Ghana being against the use of the US dollars in International transactions. This is not the case. We are not on any mission against the use of the dollars in international transactions, far from it. In fact, we want to accommodate all US dollars in our reserves. But we have a specific issue to deal with oil imports and the prices of fuel, food and transport and utilities that’s essentially what we are targeting,” the Vice President explained.

The cedi has over some months taken a downturn resulting in high prices of fuel, goods and services.