Today, it is difficult to identify any country that is not facing one problem or another and the situation is worse in under-developed and developing countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa.
These countries, including Ghana, complain of unbudgeted expenditures caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 in 2020 as well as expenditures to fix the post-COVID-19 crises.
And as they were at it, the war in Ukraine erupted on February 24, this year and now disrupting a lot of programmes across the world, particularly the food supply chain.
Clearly, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have combined to undermine economies, which are sharing certain difficulties in addition to crises peculiar to them.
The situation is causing unrests in many countries because the citizenry do not see their political leaders attempting any solution, which is tantamount to their ineptitude or neglect of the responsibility towards the people.
In Ghana, some of the peculiar problems are multiple
increases in prices of goods daily, which has implications for the purchasing power; diarrhoeal depreciation of the cedi against the dollar; ever-rising inflation and speculation.
In the circumstances, there are views here and there, to the extent that even majority members of Parliament have called on President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to sack his Finance Minister, Mr Kenneth Ofori-Atta, for failing to fix the problems.
The Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) of the University of Ghana, a world-acclaimed think tank, has joined the fray in a very constructive way by highlighting the challenges facing the economy and offering solutions.
Its suggestions include the reduction in the size of government; injection of more foreign exchange and safeguarding it on the market; and ensuring discipline and efficiency in the economy towards securing value for money by cutting down on expenditure.
It has also advocated the introduction of measures to increase revenue mobilization; and the government taking a serious view of the country’s growing debt in order to stop borrowing from the internal capital market this year to raise more forex to shore up the cedi.
The ISSER believes that such measures could reduce the
hardship and bring some confidence in the economy.
Already President Akufo-Addo and his lieutenants have been making calls for collective solution of the current hardship in the country.
To that end, the ISSER suggestions must be given the needed attention
These are already cooked suggestions that hold promise and they can help save the government too much time, resources and the trouble of now going to have meetings, adopt measures for the perusal of the Council of State and approval of the Cabinet.
The times the country finds itself in now naturally would elicit various suggestions, some workable and others not, which calls for care to pick and choose but the Ghanaian Times believes for its global pedigree and integrity, ISSER would never proffer solutions that would turn round to hunt the nation.
While we appreciate the contribution of ISSER, we also want to suggest that the government must adopt swift measures to stop the speculation in the system because it is coming from economic saboteurs whose joy is to see the government fail in its efforts to reconstruct and stabilise the economy.
The government should also ignore the insincere partisan praises and live up to the task.
