Member of Parliament (MP) for Bolgatanga Central Constituency, Isaac Adongo, has hit at Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta following the presentation of the 2022 mid-year budget to Parliament on Monday, July 25.
Speaking to the media after the Finance Minister’s presentation, the NDC MP said Mr Ofori-Atta only came to parliament to present a cooked GDP to suppress the deficit.
Mr Ofori Atta has disclosed that Ghana’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate has been revised from 5.8 percent to 3.7 percent.
According to him, the revision in the country’s GDP projection and other macroeconomic variables is necessitated by the current economic hardships in the world.
“In the light of significant changes in the global environment and our own unique challenges, we have revised our economic growth estimate for 2022 to 3.7 percent, down from 5.8 percent as stated in the 2022 budget,” he said.
But, the deputy ranking member of the Finance Committee of Parliament disagrees.
“When you revise the GDP, it means that whatever figure that sits on the GDP, that figure becomes smaller so he is able to get a deficit of 6.6 percent by artificially cooking a GDP that doesn’t exist.
“When I tell you that man is a danger to us, you think that it is personal. No serious ethical person will do what he came to do. That you are cooking your numbers, you are adding to the expenditure, your revenues are not performing; your expenditures are going up because your interest payment is more. Your economy is not performing because your GDP is struggling.
He said the minority group will properly audit the figures he announced in parliament and it will show that he lied to Ghanaians.
“Ken Ofori Atta is digging the grave to go to jail tomorrow because we will properly audit these numbers and it will show that what he came to do today was not what he originally put on the other paper which he asked for more money to spend,” he noted.
