Former Finance Minister and Member of Parliament for Karaga Dr Mohammed Amin Adam has strongly rejected claims by the current Finance Minister that Ghana’s IMF-supported programme derailed under the previous Akufo-Addo administration.
Contributing to the debate on the Finance Minister’s statement on Ghana’s exit from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme, Dr Amin Adam described the assertion as inaccurate and inconsistent with the IMF’s own assessment of the programme.
According to him, the IMF’s Fourth Review report demonstrated that Ghana met all six performance criteria under the programme by the end of 2024.
“Mr Speaker, in the Finance Minister’s statement, he mentioned that the IMF programme derailed under us and I want to inform them that the use of the word derail is inappropriate and not correct,” he said.
Dr Amin Adam argued that the IMF’s performance measures showed the programme remained on track under the previous administration.
“If you go to page 74 in the IMF 4th review document, the IMF put out the performance measures by which they passed an IMF approval and the programme has six targets and by the end of 2024, all the targets were met,” he stated.
He further noted that under the programme’s indicative targets, three out of four benchmarks were achieved.
“You come to the indicative target which also has four targets and three of them were met and only one was not met. So how can someone say this is a programme that was derailed?” he questioned.
The former Finance Minister maintained that under IMF programme rules, a programme can only be considered derailed when a performance criterion is missed, necessitating a waiver before a review can be approved.
“If you go to the IMF lexicon of programme derailment, the IMF will tell you only when you miss a performance target that the programme will be said to be derailed because by then you have to ask for a waiver before you can pass the review,” he explained.
Dr Amin Adam also accused the government of attempting to alter perceptions about the state of the economy through what he described as politically motivated revisions of fiscal data.
“Everybody knows you did politics. You brought your voodoo figures in order to change the narrative about the fiscal outturns and you have no monopoly over that,” he said.
The Karaga MP insisted that the previous administration handed over an IMF programme that was largely on course and urged government officials to present a balanced account of the country’s economic performance.