John Dramani Mahama, the flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), has vowed to amend the Public Financial Management Act to cap the amount of money the country can borrow from external creditors.
Mahama, while noting the lack of transparency in the country’s debt management, said the next NDC administration will make the debt management department of the Finance Ministry an autonomous body mandated to publish the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio quarterly.
He said this when he addressed a gathering at Dodowa in the Shai-Osudoku constituency as part of his Greater Accra regional campaign on Monday.
“There is no transparency in our debt management. The only time we hear how much we owe as Ghanaians is when the Minister of Finance is reading the budget and tells us what our debt-to-GDP is. NDC is going to change that.
“We are going to make the debt management department of the Finance Ministry a separate autonomous department. It will be a Debt Management Authority and it will have a head who will be autonomous and he will publish every quarter what our debt-to-GDP numbers are.
“Aside from that, we will change parts of the Public Financial Management Act and put a clause there on how much money a Finance Minister can borrow. So, if we agree that we should not borrow more than 60% of GDP, then we will put it in the Public Financial Management Act so that no finance minister can come in future and borrow money as badly as he wants and leave a debt for the young people who are sitting here,” he stated.
