In a lecture delivered on “The State of the Ghana Economy – A Foundation of Concrete or Straw.”on Thursday, Vice-presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party, Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia labelled the President Mahama administration as the government that has borrowed the highest and the worst in terms of debt management in the history of the 4 Republic.
According to Dr. Bawumia government’s claim of replacing maturing short-term loans with longer-term ones is not working as the Finance Ministry just acquired a one billion dollar-Eurobond for a short-term of 5 years.
Reacting to the assertions, Mr. Terkper said “We have a debt management policy that has many objectives, we do not have only one objective. Given that the Ghanaian economy has began to pick up, it will not make sense to keep a one billion Eurobond debt for ten or fifteen years.”
Ghana’s fifth Eurobond issue was halted in July, 2016 with explanation that economic conditions did not favour Ghana at the time, which would have led to high interest charges on the bond.
“We realized at the time we wanted to issue the bond that investors were not taking the positive economic conditions into consideration. For example, that Ghana’s oil production has increased with the Ten oil field coming on board, that the economy has started turning around. So we had to wait for these positives to kick in, which is why we got a more favourable 9.3% interest rate on the bond.”
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