According to him, Ghana was classified as a HIPC country in 1998-1999 by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank few years before the New Patriotic Party (NPP) began ruling the nation.
Although the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government at the time made attempts to salvage the situation, Baako said, it did not have the courage to turn things around. Kweku Baako was speaking on Joy FM on Saturday. He explained that the Kufuor administration – in March, 2001 – went HIPC by only accepting the reality on the ground.
He further noted that when the Mills-led government took over power in 2009, it did not inherit a HIPC economy. “Kufuor did not leave Ghana a HIPC country; he left it with some debt burden but not a HIPC country…” Malik Baako insisted.
Commenting on issues raised by the opposition NPP that government was borrowing too much and that the country could be left in untold debt if care is not taken, Mr Baako stated that there was no government in Ghanaian history that had prosecuted a massive developmental agenda without sustaining debt.
He added, however, that sounding a note of caution was in the right direction since those raising such concerns would not want to see Ghana go back into the HIPC situation.
“That I believe is a legitimate call.
“What projects we are going to apply those loans [to] also, is legitimate to scrutinse,” he noted adding that Ghana is no longer the economy it used to be before 2001.
He indicated that the country’s economy had expanded to that of a middle-income country with oil and gas rsources but that “the question [now] is whether we have the capacity to deal with debt servicing and payments relative to the debt profile…”
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