<\/p>\n
Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu<\/strong>)<\/p>\n MAJORITY LEADER Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu has said African countries need, as a matter of urgency, to promote diversified growth and job creation which a focus on youth, women, the poor and marginalised areas to whittle down the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n According to him, stringent measures must be made in a structured manner to increase domestic revenue mobilisation and improve the quality of public expenditures and strengthen debt management.<\/p>\n Mr. Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, who is also the acting Vice Chairperson of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA), indicated that at the height of the pandemic, food production and food security came under intense threat.<\/p>\n Speaking at the opening of the Executive Committee Meeting of the CPA\u2013Africa Region in Accra yesterday, the Majority Leader pointed out that industrial production was also negatively impacted with industry performing minimally, and thereby scaling down on employment.<\/p>\n \u201cMany were rendered jobless and tax revenue for governments slumped, while the cost of import escalated, national debt ballooned and debt servicing has become burdensome for most developing economies, including most of us commonwealth Africa countries,\u201d he intimated.<\/p>\n He said an expert report of the UN indicated that COVID-19 is expected to push an additional 30 million people into extreme poverty in Africa, \u201cyet vaccination which science has informed us that it could turn things around remains extremely low when compared to other continents.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLess than 2 percent of Africa\u2019s population is fully vaccinated; the crisis has exacerbated the demand for public goods and services in recent times.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe demand for good roads, water, electricity, housing and employment of youth among other demands by the citizens has been on the rise and yet delivery has been seriously undermined by the impact of COVID-19,\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n Mr. Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu said \u201cThe crisis has also shaken the foundation ideals of our democracies. We all witnessed how challenging it was for our democratic institutions to find the balance between the management of public health and the right to personal liberties, right to protest, and conduct of democratic elections to elect political leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n High on the agenda of the executive committee meeting is how to strengthen cooperation among the Commonwealth member states in Africa to address the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n BY Ernest Kofi Adu<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu) MAJORITY LEADER Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu has said African countries need, as a matter of urgency, to promote diversified growth and job creation which a focus on youth, women, the poor and marginalised areas to whittle down the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to him, stringent measures must be made in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":974487,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[5262,5810,243,118,1612,200],"class_list":["post-1015871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-creation","tag-growth","tag-job","tag-lets","tag-promote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1015871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015871\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1015871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1015871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1015871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}