We’ll correct Bawumia at the appropriate time – Veep

• Posted on September 13, 2016
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

The Vice President, Kwesi Amissah-Arthur has rebuked the New Patriotic Party’s running mate, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia for criticizing government expenditure.

Bawumia at a lecture last Thursday among other things accused government of spending more money to refinance debts than it spent on productive assets.

He also said not only is Ghana spending more on interest payments than on infrastructure, but is also spending more on interest payments than the value of key agricultural production like Cocoa, livestock, fishing, forestry and logging – put together.

But the Vice President speaking at the launch of the Greater Accra Zonal campaign at Ashiaman in Accra on Sunday said Dr. Bawumia’s claim is wrong saying “at the appropriate time, we will correct him and teach him the things that he doesn’t know.”“How can you say that we paid interest more than capital expenditure? It is that capital expenditures money that we are paying as interest so this one is a simple thing you learn in primary school so I don’t know how people who have qualifications cannot understand this simple concept. In economics we call it classification, you have to classify that interest payment into the things that you used that money from. You don’t pay money for nothing; you don’t pay interest if you haven’t borrowed money. You pay interest when you have borrowed money.”

“When you have borrowed the money and you have paid the interest, that interest you say that this one was for this road, this one was for hospital, this one was for educational institutions, so then you take the interest and classify it according to the projects that you use the money for. So you cannot come and say that interest payments have exceeded capital payments therefore we have made some mistake, no. At the appropriate time, we will correct him and teach him the things that he doesn’t know,” Amissah-Arthur added.

Bawumia selectively used debt figures – Terkper

Finance Minister, Seth Terkper had also said Dr. Bawumia selectively used the data on government for his lecture.