Communications Minister Dr Omane Boamah says the lecture given by the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana served a better propaganda purpose than an academic exposition.
He said Dr Mahamudu Bawumia did not do justice to the institution, the Central University College and to the students who came to listen to him.
At best he said the running mate of the New Patriotic Party “embellished the facts to dwarf the monumental achievements made by government.”
He said the attempts by Dr Bawumia to question the sanctity of the figures provided by the Statistical Service which formed the basis of the IMF bailout was disingenuous.
At the 4th edition of the Distinguished Speaker Series organised by the Central University College, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia gave a rather grim picture of the country’s economy and suggested that the 1 billion dollars IMF bailout was not the panacea to the economic challenges.
He said the money made available by the IMF under the bailout is equivalent to the amount to be spent in building three Kumasi Central markets.
The NPP Vice Presidential aspirant said the country had to return to the IMF because of corruption, fiscal indiscipline, ballooning and unsustainable debts and it would take sound rigorous economic intervention to turn the scales of the economy around.
Dr Bawumia did not understand the gaping differences in economic data from the Statistical Service and that of the Ministry of Agriculture and sought to question the credibility of the figures provided by the former.
But in a response Dr Omane Boamah said the NPP vice presidential candidate had a reputation of running down the Statistical Service and got it all wrong with his comparison of figures from the Service to that of the Ministry of Agriculture.
He said the Statistical Service remains the country’s reliable institution for data gathering and interpretation.
He stated that the IMF which has a superior statistical and analytical skill went through the data provided by government, had some challenges especially with the debt rationalisation but in the end approved the data.
He added that the issues raised by Dr Bawumia were nothing new and that the government was working assiduously to resolve the challenges.
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