{"id":1268320,"date":"2022-12-21T07:10:26","date_gmt":"2022-12-21T07:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/12\/21\/economic-crisis-ghana-cant-continue-with-unfettered-free-shs\/"},"modified":"2022-12-21T07:10:26","modified_gmt":"2022-12-21T07:10:26","slug":"economic-crisis-ghana-cant-continue-with-unfettered-free-shs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/12\/21\/economic-crisis-ghana-cant-continue-with-unfettered-free-shs\/","title":{"rendered":"Economic crisis: Ghana can&#8217;t continue with unfettered Free SHS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>A former Finance Minister, Seth Terkper, has urged the Akufo-Addo government to rethink the model of the Free Senior High School policy and some capital-intensive projects in view of the current economic crisis.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking on <strong>Eyewitness News<\/strong> on Tuesday, Mr Terkper said it will be prudent for the government to suspend some projects for a year to allow the economy to pick up before those projects are revived.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI am going to use the Free SHS, unfettered free SHS, I am free to say it because in 2017 I tweeted and said unfettered free SHS was attractive but cannot be achieved. Ghana cannot do unfettered free SHS,\u201d Mr Terkper told host Umaru Sanda Amadu.<\/p>\n<p>He added that \u201cIf we have a project which we have signed to complete in three years I think we can suspend it for one year until we improve the situation\u2026for instance some roads or some hospitals.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mr Terkper\u2019s comments come on the back of the government\u2019s staff-level agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a $3 billion extended credit facility to help revive the economy.<\/p>\n<p>The government as part of measures to rescue the ailing economy has also announced a debt exchange programme for domestic bondholders and a suspension of payments for external bondholders.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__large__nEccO body__full_width__ekUdw body__large_body__FV5_X article-body__element__2p5pI\" data-testid=\"paragraph-4\">The IMF has said a comprehensive debt restructuring is a condition of its support.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__large__nEccO body__full_width__ekUdw body__large_body__FV5_X article-body__element__2p5pI\" data-testid=\"paragraph-5\">The country has been struggling to refinance its debt since the start of the year after downgrades by multiple credit rating agencies on concerns it would not be able to issue new Eurobonds.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A former Finance Minister, Seth Terkper, has urged the Akufo-Addo government to rethink the model of the Free Senior High School policy and some capital-intensive projects in view of the current economic crisis. Speaking on Eyewitness News on Tuesday, Mr Terkper said it will be prudent for the government to suspend some projects for a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1268321,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[1191,1856,3010,2756,85,5480,29949],"class_list":["post-1268320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-continue","tag-crisis","tag-economic","tag-free","tag-ghana","tag-shs","tag-unfettered"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1268320","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=1268320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1268320\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1268320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1268320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1268320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}