In our earlier article we highlighted the dishonest submissions of Dr Bawumia and brought to the fore the true character of the party with which he has unfortunately associated himself, with an oblivious glee. In this second part we turn our attention to the issues of Dr Bawumia's supposed Midas touch in economic management and expose flawed arguments he made in attempting to compare the Kufuor led NPP’s performance to that of the Mills led NDC.
Indeed the more he spoke the more scary the prospects of his stewardship as the leader of the government economic management team looks. And as we read through the text of his speech we ask where this handsome Ghanaian was when Kufuor deviously and with questionable motives engaged the services of a London barber shop to foist the CNTCI and IFS loans on the people of Ghana? Dr Bawumia was in the thick of the Bank of Ghana's operations at the time! If he could pass those loans off as credible, one can imagine what will happen if this innocent man is the vice President of Ghana. The crooks who engineered those loans will certainly go haywire.
Now to some of the figures
According to Dr Bawumia between 2000 and 2008, growth was increased from 5.4billion to 28.5billion dollars. This would average 2.9% GDP growth per annum. He then states that President Mills grew the economy to more than 38billion dollars over the three years in office. This averages over 3 percent per annum. 2.9% and 3%, which one is more? So even by Dr Bawumia's figures, President Mills has out-performed the Kufuor government on annual basis!
What makes Dr Bawumia’s submissions more pathetic is that President Mills’ superior performance has been achieved against the backdrop of the NDC having taken over
1. depleted foreign reserves,
2. a runaway rate of inflation,
3. prohibitive interest rates and
4. a record budget deficit of 14.5%,
Note: the 14.5% over-shoot in 2008 by Kufuor was in spite of the $900million auction of Ghana Telecom to Vodafone and the €1billion cash receipts from the Eurobonds issued in that same year. But for that reckless squander of our national resources by the NPP prior to leaving office, the NDC would have massively dwarfed Kufuor's meagre growth touted by Dr Bawumia.
As if that self-humiliation was not enough, Dr Bawumia, on whom the NPP's intellectual resource will depend to magically grow our economy, makes the baseless claim that the NDC government was luckier, compared to the NPP's 8year performance. But he could not have been more wrong! Looking at gold prices alone the NPP comes out as the luckiest in the history of the fourth republic. As the NDC was leaving office in 2001, gold prices were at the lowest of $271.00 an ounce. But by the time the NPP left in 2008, the price of an ounce of gold was a whooping $872 translating into an average rise per annum of 27.4% which is more than 26.7% per annum under the current NDC government. As at Dec 2011, the price of an ounce of gold stood at $1,571 translating into that lower average rise per annum. Clearly the figures show that the NPP enjoyed a higher annual rise in Gold prices per annum and therefore was luckier than the NDC in terms of revenues derived from gold. This is notwithstanding the massive availability of over 6billion dollars accrued from going HIPC alone! We should be asking "where is the money?”.
Worse still, at the twilight of NDC1 government all the lucky things in our international trade were scarce except the lowest gold, timber and cocoa prices, coupled with the highest oil prices on record. Then came the NPP when the situation reversed and got much better over their entire reign. Did Dr Bawumia know these facts of our economic history? Who was he fooling?
What is the Bible?
The NPP have lately started holding the positions that:
1. A World Bank report is not the Bible
2. An IMF report is not the Bible
3. A Current UN report on defence spending is not the Bible
4. A Ghana Statistical Service report is not the Bible
Yet Dr Bawumia has peppered his presentation with a lot of data. We therefore ask Dr Bawumia the following questions:
1. Which source(s) are your figures from?
2. Are your sources the Bible?
Do We Eat Inflation Now?
Not long ago the NPP and their supporters told Ghanaians that all the talk about inflation was irrelevant to the economic condition of Ghanaians and that we do not eat inflation. Interestingly, Dr Bawumia finds it necessary to extol the virtues of low inflation. In a shameless swallow of its own spit, the NPP, via Dr Bawumia says low inflation:
1. reduces the cost of living
2. reduces interest rates
3. stabilizes the exchange rate
4. reduces the cost of doing business
5. reduce uncertainty
6. increase private sector investment and
7. Enhances economic growth and job creation.
How interesting!
Dr Bawumia’s comical view of inflation and his Voodoonomics.
It is clear that his basic view of inflation is doubtful. Otherwise if he understands and accepts that inflation is the rate of increase in prices of goods and services or that the rate at which the value of peoples incomes are discounted or the rate at which people purchasing power is reduced, what is the point in, him, saying that "prices are increasing"? In fact that categorical statement is exactly what inflation means, whether single or double digits; a point with which nobody contends, except him! Why does Dr Bawumia have to engage in this ridiculous act of tying a single yam with a rope in order to carry it?
The NPP's economic whiz kid then went on to consolidate his farcical economics adventure, when he subjectively sampled only 6 (out of the GSS' 240 sample) items and used that to casually indicate price inflation! As a result he asks a spurious rhetorical question “Do we really have single digit inflation?” If we don't, why didn't he provide us with an alternative figure upon which he based his analysis?
Indeed as we read through the speech, we cannot help but dread the prospect of Dr Bawumia assisting Nana Addo to, God forbid, man Ghana's economy. Whiles the latter has be certified in the wikileaks reports as often disorganised, the former's latest speech portrays him, as far as Ghana's economy is concerned, as a comical stranger in Jerusalem. Adopting Dr Bawumia’s position on the economy would be tantamount to taking directions from a lost person. We would rather take it with a pinch of salt.
Ghana’s Energy Situation
On the issue of insufficiency of energy in Ghana, Dr Bawumia conveniently ignored the fact that the NDC has massively increased investment in the energy sector. In order to score cheap political points, he chose to ignore the impact of increased energy consumption characteristic of an expanding economy and unfairly focused on consequences of increased consumption pressures on the national grid.
What Dr Bawumia fails to realise is that the difficulties we are having in energy supply is not as a result of lack of investment but rather caused by the disproportionate increase in demand from increased energy consumption by industrial and real estate sectors of the economy. For example at the Ghana Free Zones enclave alone, over 50 companies (equalling 361 million dollars investment) have started operating since the NDC assumed office. Education infrastructure has been hugely expanded, and there is a general growth in economic activities.
In the first quarter of 2012 alone the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre has recorded over $1billion foreign direct investment into the country. All these have implications for energy demand. It is simply the height of cheap political point-scoring, if not pure analytical paralysis, for Dr Bawumia to attribute the difficulties in consistence of electricity to government non-performance.
As far as the hopes and aspirations of Ghanaians are concerned, there is no alternative to the NDC and President Mills’ vision.
God bless our home land Ghana.
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