Financial independence requires a lot of discipline – Economist

Imani Ghana fellow, Professor Godfred Bokpin has said that the government of Ghana needs to exercise a lot of restraint in its expenditure if it indeed intends to achieve full financial independence.

According to him, Ghanaians will only be able to decipher the true intentions of persons in power and leadership by looking at how their spending is characterized.

Discussing the 2019 budget during an inaugural fellowship lecture on the theme “How the 2019 budget addresses sustainability concerns of post-IMF programme” in Accra, Professor Bokpin said, a chunk of revenue generated as per the budget will be used for the payment of salaries of government workers.

“The total expenditure for government in the 2019 budget is GHC73.4billion and the biggest item in the composition is this expenditure is compensation of employees which takes GHC22.3 billion” he said.

Prof Bokpin explained that, the expenditure set aside for the less than 600,000 employees as will only create more burden on government to generate more revenue.

He said, government plans to generate GHC45.3 billion revenue and out of that GHC 22.3 billion goes into the payment of salaries, allowances and wages of government workers.

“The next biggest item on the budget is interest payment which takes GHC 18.7 billion and this is how much we are setting in 2019 just to service our debt and mind you, this has nothing to do with principle of repayment, it is just the interest on our debt alone” he noted.

The Imani fellow added that, the projected revenue to be generated will be totally scrapped off when the compensation and interest payment projected is added meaning that, “the government cannot tell us it will not go back to borrow then perhaps they do not know what they are about”.