You can't continue to blame coronavirus for economic woes - Seth Terkper to govt

Seth Terkper, a former Minister of Finance, has said that the government should not capitalize on the effects of the coronavirus to blame it for the economic woes the country is experiencing.

He explained that the government is deceiving the Ghanaian populace with the false assumptions that the economy is ailing because of the pandemic and its ravages to the country.

He made this known at the Citi TV/UPSA’s 2021 Post-Budget Dialogue on Thursday, March 18, 2021, reports citinewsroom.com.

“There appears to be an effort [by the government] to blame everything on COVID-19, but there were problems before COVID-19,” he stated.

Recently, many government officials on various platforms have indicated that like other countries across the world, Ghana’s economy has been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, contributing to the huge amounts of revenue it lost.

During his presentation of the 2021 Budget in Parliament, the caretaker Minister of Finance, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu pegged the fiscal impact of the coronavirus at GHS19.7 billion.

Earlier this month, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, the Minister of Information, had told the media that the effects of the coronavirus on the country’s economy had been so severe that there was the need for critical attention to be paid to its quick recovery.

“The effect of the pandemic, among other things, has been a sharp reversal in the macroeconomic and fiscal gains that we were making up until the pandemic. This week, the government has two major events, the SONA and the budget that are expected to kick off the 2021 programme,” he said at a press conference.

However, Seth Terkper has indicated that such claims are not entirely true as the economy of the country was already impaired before the coronavirus came.