I've done a good job stabilising economy – Mahama

President John Mahama has said he has done a good job in stabilising the economy since coming into office.

Speaking in an interview with Sunrise FM on Thursday April 14, during his ‘Accounting to the People’ tour of the Eastern Region, Mr Mahama said his administration has managed to stabilise the economy and “we are returning to a period of growth”.

“…If you look at the World Bank report that appeared yesterday, it named Ghana as one of the countries with very high expectations of growth and it said that the prospects of the Ghanaian economy are high, that investor confidence has risen, and that Ghana is entering a new era of prosperity and blossom, and, so,…it shows that Ghana has very good prospects going forward,” Mr Mahama said.

According to him, his administration has reduced the Deficit-to-GDP ratio to below 7.2%, a decimal notch lower than the projected 7.3%, from the 12% he inherited in 2012.

This year, Mr Mahama said, “we are going to bring it down to 5.3%, then it means that inflation will gradually come down; we are looking to bring inflation back down to a single digit, then once inflation is coming down, then interest rates will gradually follow, and, so, the prospects look very good and I am very bullish about the Ghanaian economy.”

“If you take the Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU) [report], they said 2017 and onward is going to be a period of prosperity for Ghana and that is because of the foundation that we have laid, it’s because of the work that we have done, we’ve eliminated a lot of the deficits that were created by huge subsidies on utility tariffs, we eliminated a lot of the subsidies that created huge deficits on the cost of petroleum products.

“Today as I speak, Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) is running, and producing petroleum products for Ghana, we have enough stock of LPG, our tanks and strategic reserves for petroleum products are all full, and, so, we have ships standing offshore Ghana with petroleum products, but there is no space to offload those products, and, so, we’ve done a good job in stabilising various sectors of the economy.

"Today we are supplying diesel and petrol to Burkina Faso and Mali from our Bolga Depot. Our Bolga Depot was shut down for so many years, the pipeline from Buipe to Bolga was not operational, today we are pumping fuel from Buipe to Bolga and we are loading 40 trucks a day to Burkina Faso and Mali, I mean if that is not economic progress, I don’t know what else anybody will call economic progress.

“Yes we’ve been through a period of challenges and we’ve had to make sacrifices as citizens but I believe that in everyone’s life, there are times when you have to make sacrifices in order that things get better for the future, we are working to ensure that we create a better future for not only our citizens of today but for our citizens of tomorrow. And I believe we are doing a good job at it. The economy is more resilient today than it was in the past, it’s not an economy in crisis, absolutely not, if you see and economy in crisis you’d know that it is an economy in crisis. This economy is not in crisis and it is growing.”