Ghana’s high budget deficit can be put down the governing party’s “reckless” spending in the leading up to the 2012 general elections, three-time flag-bearer of the main opposition New Patriotic Party, Nana Akufo-Addo has said.

“In 2009, the NDC was handed the best economy inherited by any new government since the 1960s, with oil coming in and a debt-to-GDP ratio of just 29%.

“In the last few months to the 2012 election, we all saw the reckless spending the NDC government undertook in a desperate move to hold on to power. The budget deficit alone for that year was the same as the entire national budget for 2008. Today, we are all suffering the consequences of those irresponsible actions,” Akufo-Addo said at the second Aliu Mahama memorial lecture at the Banquet Hall in Accra.

The former foreign affairs Minister in the Kufuor Government said: “When I checked this morning, I was told that we have some $1.5 billion in our net foreign reserves, just enough to cover two weeks of imports. And our debts are so big that we are using four times the money we expect from producing oil this year to service interest payments alone in 2014.”

“I also learnt that for 2015, the rate of growth of our economy is expected to be much smaller than it has been this year. The expected growth rate – 3.9% – would be the worst since the year 2000. This does not seem like the year of recovery the Government is telling us that 2015 will be and the new Budget is hardly the budget for transforming our economy,” Akufo-Addo asserted.

The situation now, he told the audience, “is worse than we were in a year ago; 2013 was worse than 2012; and 2012 was worse than 2011. Yet, this was the Ghana that was so successful in managing its non-oil economy that, in 2009, the US President, Barack Obama, was able to call Ghana the poster child for a great story of “Africa Rising”. Five years later, on August 5 this year, the Financial Times carried the headline: “Ghana tarnishes ‘Africa Rising’ story”, as we were forced to run back to the IMF for a bailout.”

“We had worked hard to wean ourselves off dependence on the IMF to enable us undertake the growth that would transform our nation. Now with oil, Ghana is on a downward slope. The sudden and calamitous decline has left many friends, many institutions, many investors, totally perplexed. How did it all go so spectacularly wrong?”