Ghana might not get a dime from IMF

Ghana is unlikely to get a dime from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as is anticipated, because of the sheer volume of funds that the Akufo-Addo administration has received from both the IMF and World Bank between 2020 and 2021, critics have noted.

Under the guise of COVID-19 challenges, the Akufo-Addo administration secured some US$ 2.4 billion as Special Drawing Right (SDR) and other interventions from the IMF.

Now, a few days ago, the World Bank Country Director Pierre Frank Laporte, revealed how for the first time in the history of the country, the World Bank, between June 2021 and July 2022 had released a lump sum of a staggering $903 million to support Ghana.

According to Pierre Frank Laporte, it’s the first of its kind for the World Bank to release such an amount in a single year for Ghana.

“I would like to take this opportunity to report the performance of our program in Ghana over the last fiscal year that just ended on June 30th. Between July 1st, 2021 and June 30th, 2022 the World Bank approved a total of $903 million for Ghana. Never in the history of Ghana has a development institution approved such a large amount of money in one single year,” the World Bank boss said in a gathering that included President Akufo-Addo a few days ago.

These amounts are one of the biggest fund release by the Bretton Woods institutions. Yet, the Akufo-Addo administration simply squandered them and is desperately seeking an IMF fiscal programme in the hope of securing more funds.

It is unclear if the US$ 903 million released between 2021 and 2022 factored in the total of us$ 560 million that the World Bank had released to Ghana in 2020 to fight COVID-19.

Whatever the case may be, the Akufo-Addo administration has refused to account for how that amount was spent in an ironic twist where less than two years after receiving such colossal sums, the corrupt Akufo-Addo administration is now frantically seeking a financial bailout from the IMF.

Recent revelations from members of the ruling party show that these amounts were simply handed out to party functionaries and “footsoldiers” as personal spending money.

Last year, a corruption assessment report was prepared by an alliance of anti-corruption organisations called the Community Development Alliance and the Commonwealth Foundation, revealing massive corruption in the disbursement of COVID-19 funds by the Akufo-Addo administration.

The report showed how a significant portion of the US$ 2.1 billion (GHC 12.4 billion) COVID-19 funds sourced from various avenues was blown by the government on shady deals.

According to the group, the procurement processes for the acquisition of “Veronica Buckets”, Temperature guns, feeding programmes, face masks, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) among others were done in an opaque manner with little accountability.

The report is curiously titled “Strengthening COVID-19 Accounting Mechanism (SCAM)”.

Source: whatsupnewsghana