Bawumia lied – Seth Terkper

Ghana’s Finance Minister Seth Terkper has said Dr Mahamudu Bawumia threw dust into the eyes of Ghanaians in his reaction to the 2016 Budget Statement.

According to him, the New Patriotic Party’s vice presidential candidate’s presentation was full of “inconsistencies” aimed at “portraying cynical points.”

The former deputy governor of the Bank of Ghana said under the International Monetary Fund’s bailout arrangement with the John Mahama-led administration, a lot of public sector workers will lose their jobs in 2017.

Dr Bawumia said it is one of the conditionalities for the $918 million bailout, but the government is shelving it until 2017 because of fear of losing next year’s election.

“It’s a lie,” Terkper told Accra-based Joy FM.

“We have already said that the memorandum on economic and financial policy is on the IMF website. Where does it say explicitly that government is going to lay off workers. The word rationalization is not new.”

He added: “We have all complain about the public service not being productive and government wants to do something about it. We are implementing it with respect to all employees on the government payroll. The rationalization does not refer to the core civil service but the public service at large. If it is about plan to sack workers the IMF would have put it there.

“It is also not true that we have not done more with oil revenue.”

Terkper advised Bawumia not to “trivialize the issues.”

“Bawumia knows that government financing of the deficits come from the treasuries. He is trivializing the issues for the purposes of portraying a cynical point… Bawumia makes the same mistakes he accuses the president of making… when it comes to their denomination of debt they denominate it in dollar terms and there are some inconsistencies… in their own presentation there has been no analysis.”