Gold-for-oil policy will reduce forex pressures on BoG, bring down fuel prices – Bawumia

The new gold-for-oil policy will work to the benefit of Ghanaians in the next few months, Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia has said.

At the New Patriotic Party’s thanksgiving service recently, Dr Bawumia said: “Today, we’ve implemented a new policy that the public and the country will see its benefit in the next few months – gold-for-oil – and that is going to reduce the demand on the Bank of Ghana for foreign exchange and bring down the fuel prices”.

“You’ve already seen the fuel prices coming down. These are new ideas; transformational ideas”, he said.

In his view, the NPP is the only party with such ideas.

“We are a government of transformational ideas and, in the last six years, we are thankful to God for the ideas that this government has been able to implement”, he noted.

He listed some of those ideas as: “One constituency-one ambulance, one district-one factory, one village-one dam, zongo development fund, planting for food and jobs, zipline drones, which are delivering medicine all across the country”.

Dr Bawumia continued: “We’ve implemented the Ghana card; 17 million people have been enrolled”, adding: “Today, if you are a student and you have a Ghana card, you don’t need a guarantor to get a student loan to go to the university. New idea – the digital address – today, we have a national property address system, so, every location, every building has a unique digital address; that has never happened in our history”.

Further, he said: “Our ports have gone paperless. We have mobile money interoperability between the mobile account and the bank account – the first country in Africa to do so”.

Additionally, he noted: “Today, because of digitalisation, if you want to enrol on the national health insurance, you just sit in your home and enrol. If you want to renew it, you sit in your home and do it on your phone. If you want to buy electricity credit, you sit in your home and buy it on your phone. It’s unprecedented. If you want to apply for your passport, you sit in your home and apply for it. It’s unprecedented.”

In the education sector, Dr Bawumia noted: “We brought free TVET and invested in the TVET institutions and we have got free senior high school education. These are all ideas that this country is benefitting from and these are ideas that did not exist before and we have God Almighty to thank”.

“This doesn’t mean our challenges are over. No”, he pointed out, saying: “The challenges will always be there and when we face the challenges, I believe the NPP government is the best government to deal with the challenges that we are facing. There’s no doubt about it”.

“We will deal with all the challenges that we are facing”.

“We haven’t finished everything but by the grace of God, the battle continues to be the Lord’s, and with good and sound policies, new ideas and transformational policies, by the grace of God, we shall overcome”.