The economy could do better than this - Seth Terkper

•Mr Terkper said, the economy could be doing well because it has all raw materials to function

•He said discovering oil was one of the best which helped us to overcome the disturbance of economic instability

•He noted that export crude oil and gas was the mechanism that was used to save the economy from HIPC

Former Minister of Finance, Seth Terkper has stated that the country’s current economic standings could be doing well but more needs to be done to sustain itself to overcome future crisis.

According to Mr Terkper, the country’s economy could be better because it has all the raw materials that could position it to compete with other economies across the world.

“We are doing well or had been doing well but we should watch it, but my response is that we could be doing better,” he said in an interview with GhanaWeb’s Amos Ekow Coffie on BizTech.

He added that, discovering oil was one of the best which helped us to overcome the disturbance of economic instability in the previous year but much needs to be done to sustain that.

“The reason why I am saying we could do better goes back ten years when we have discovered oil already and we started producing oil in commercial quantities and exporting crude oil and then later Gas, that came on the hills of hardship, which forgave our debt our those levels. But that economic situation itself was a disturbance of the disability which had been talking about since the launch of the stability fund which stopped our negative growth and until last year Ghana had never had any negative growth,”

“Given the room, we had for HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries), the economy started expanding particularly construction and services in 2011. Then around 2008 and 2009, the programme for export started under president Kufour, with the discovery going earlier to President Rawlings and GNPC activities, to use Oil to resolve certain problems we had known about the economy. We are borrowing to pay past debt and that is a challenge we need to be careful of,” he added.

Watch the full interview with GhanaWeb's Amos Ekow Coffie below: