Parliament on Tuesday approved the 2020 Budget and Economic Policy after a gruelling concluding debate between the Majority Leader, Mr Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, and the Minority Leader, Mr Haruna Iddrisu.
The Minister of Finance, Mr Ken Ofori-Atta, presented the Budget Statement and Financial Policy to Parliament on November 13, 2019 and the debate on it began on November 18, 2019, with Majority and Minority Members of Parliament (MPs) slugging it out in many areas.
As anticipated, Tuesday’s concluding debate, which was witnessed by the Finance Minister, was a contest as to which political party in government was the better manager of the economy.
There was also a clash between Hon. Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu and Hon. Haruna Iddrisu concerning the true state of the economy and with the passage of the Budget, the next move by Parliament is to consider and approve the Annual Budget Estimates of the various Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).
The Minority Leader who set the tone for the debate, accused the government of dwelling so much on slogans without focusing on the work, and of massaging figures in the election-year budget presented to the House and described it as propaganda budget contrary to the reality on the ground.
According to the Tamale South lawmaker, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta manufactured figures to deceive Ghanaians into thinking that the economy is healthy and faulted the GH¢400 million allocated for insurance for the agricultural sector which he said was too high.
He said the Akufo-Addo government has disrespected known values and laws such as the Public Financial Management Act, 2016 (PFMA) and the Fiscal Responsibility Act and, thus, asked Ghanaians to be vigilant and hold the government accountable.
Hon. Haruna Iddrisu was of the view that there are some acts of mismanagement undertaken by the NPP administration including numbers that are being hidden from donors, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Ghanaian public, which allowed the Finance Minister to have cooked the numbers in order to justify the deficit he wants to unleash on the Ghanaian people.
He said the 2020 Budget is laced with propaganda as some of the economic figures are been massaged to discredit the previous National Democratic Congress (NDC) government and criticized Ken Ofori-Atta’s persistent taunts of good growth of the economy within the three years, and blames on the NDC where they failed.
Hon. Haruna said the public sector employment figures stated by the Finance Minister are not accurate, stating that as at January 2017, the public sector employees figures stood at 686,000 and that the Finance Minister’s claims that the Akufo Addo government added 380,000 within the three years is not only propaganda but deceptive.
He dismissed the government’s 2020 Budget Statement presented in Parliament and as the hopeless budget ever, saying the Finance Minister presented nothing new and added that it failed to outline how to address the challenges Ghanaians are battling with.
He charged that the 2020 Budget was not different from the three other budgets presented by the Finance Minister and challenged him to brief the House on how much has been spent to clean the financial sector and urged the media to point out the lack of candour and sincerity on the part of the Minister.
The Minority Leader said government policies to create employment were not sustainable and warned that the NDC Minority will resist this illegality when they come to appropriation since majoritarian rule cannot side-step the laws of the land.
Hon. Iddrisu said it was the erstwhile National Democratic Congress (NDC) government that laid the solid foundation for the current macroeconomic gains in the country adding the NPP was only reaping the benefit and tasked the government to acknowledge the achievements of the past government and build upon them.
He rejected the suggestion by the Finance Minister that it was the NPP government that ended the power outages (dumsor) that had plagued the country for about years and declared that the NPP inherited an economy where energy was guaranteed in terms of expansion.