Ghana must live within its means – Kwesi Botchwey
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Former Minister for Finance, Prof. Kwesi Botchwey has tasked government to live within it’s means if it wants to stabilize the economy.
According to him ”we [Ghana] have been living beyond our means and [we] must borrow from the domestic and external markets to finance the deficits including soverigning bond issues in capital market”.
In a lecture delivered on Tuesday at the Distinguished Speaker Series organised by the Central University College in Accra, Prof. Botchwey said Ghana does not have the luxury of living beyond our means because the cedi is not a strong currency to support over spending.
He said contries like the United States and Britain can get away with living above it means because their currencies are ”a good store of value”.
He noted that the consequence of Ghana living beyond its limit has led to our public indebtedness reaching the limits of our external viability.
”As a nation we must understand that borrowing from any source; whether from the financial markets, through bond issues or treasury bills does carry its own conditions…,” he said.
According to the NDC stalwart it is the interest of Ghana to cut down cost and spend within our budget.
”Borrowing from international markets thus carry its own conditions and are not markedly different from the conditions from borrowing from IMF,” he warned.
”The country can decide that we will not go to IMF for funds; we can decide that instead of medium term drawings from the IMF at lower cost, we will borrow from international markets at greater costs and short tenure and with pretty much the same conditions,” he added.
He said it does not matter which of the choices we make, when we do not have clearly spelt out policies which would convince our patners that we are able to pay for the loans we are taking then it would even be difficult for the creditors to give out the loans in the first place.
”Let us be clear, nothing comes free,” he noted.
By: Evans Effah
ABOUT: Nana Kwesi Coomson
[email protected] An Entrepreneur, Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Communications Executive and Philanthropist. Editor-in-Chief of www.233times.com. A Senior Journalist with Ghanaian Chronicle Newspaper. An alumnus of Adisadel College where he read General Arts. His first degree is in Bachelor of Arts - Political Science (major) and History (minor) from the University of Ghana. He holds MSc in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Energy with Public Relations (PR) from the Robert Gordon University in the United Kingdom. He is a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow who studied at Clark Atlanta University in USA on the Business and Entrepreneurship track.
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