The Executive Director of the Alliance For Social Equity and Public Accountability (ASEPA), Mensah Thompson, has accused the government of enriching itself under the guise of the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to him, the huge sums of money the government received as donations should have been enough to manage the economy.
“Of course, there’s no doubt about the impact of Covid-19 on the private sector as a lot of the Covid measures brought about major disruptions in production as workers were in lockdown, supply chains were disrupted, and most importantly sales of non-essential commodities were on a nosedive.
But for Government, a non-profit entity which only cashed in on Covid-19 revenues it didn’t expect to receive, to advance the Covid effect as the excuse of its mismanagement was not only deceitful but dangerous,” Mensah Thompson wrote in a Facebook post.
The Auditor-General’s report disclosed that the government spent ¢10 billion of monies mobilized for Covid-19 activities on budget support.
According to the A-G, a total of ¢21,844,189,185.24 was mobilized for the fight against the pandemic.
However, out of this amount, only ¢11,750,683,059.11 was spent on curbing the spread of the virus.
Reacting to the development, the ASEPA Boss insists that Covid-19 on the economic front was nothing but a pure harvest by the government.
“Now here’s the catch, Covid-19 brought Government GHC10billion additional revenue to support its annual budgets for 2020 and 2021, in the same period Government raised $ 1 billion annually from the Capital market to support its budget, oil revenues also brought in an additional $5.4billion, not forgetting proceeds from taxes like CST, ESLA etc.
“How on earth were we fed the narrative that Covid-19 wrecked the Ghanaian economy when all it did was bring in contingency revenues to GoG?
He wants the government to apologize to Ghanaians for the mismanagement of the economy.