Prof. Steve Hanke, an American economist, has continued to criticise Minister of Finance Ken Ofori-Atta for using biblical allusions to support his claims of an economic revival.
The Economist cited a reference to Scripture the Minister made late last year in a report headed “Ghana has negotiated a preliminary IMF deal and halted debt payments,” which Hanke wrote on January 2, 2023.
“Ghana’s Finance Minister Ofori-Atta justified defaulting on debt by quoting the Bible: “nothing will be lost, nothing will be missing.”
“The Bible is a poor guide for macroeconomics. It’s time for Ofori-Atta to stop bamboozling Ghanaians and get real,” he emphasized.
Ofori-Atta made the biblical allusion when he unveiled a domestic debt exchange scheme, one of the crucial requirements that led to a staff-level agreement between the government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) a few days later.
The intention to include pensions in the Exchange programme, whose plan has been overturned and is now having an impact on individual bonds, was one of the reasons why the administration received criticism from labour.
Ghana experienced a disastrous 2022 as a result of an economic crisis that compelled the government to apply for a loan from the IMF at a time when the cedi was fast losing value, inflation was out of control, and the government was subject to many downgrades by rating agencies.
The government has repeatedly attributed some of the crises’ effects to the continuing Russia-Ukraine war and the COVID pandemic’s aftershocks.
After signing a Staff-Level Agreement with the IMF in the hopes that funding from the US$3 billion facility will be delivered early this year, it has pledged to improve the nation’s economic situation.
