A renowned economist, Kwame Pianim, has expressed great worry about the fact that the Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, is the one leading the government’s new Debt Exchange programme.

He explained that for the Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo government to allow the minister, who is behaving like a chutzpah to lead the programme, is only an indication that he is plunging the country into an even deeper economic mess.

Speaking in an interview with TV3 and monitored by GhanaWeb, Kwame Pianim said that if Ken Ofori-Atta was a genuine person, he would not be leading the country towards such an economic direction.

“For this government to allow Ken Ofori-Atta to sit in front of Ghanaians to make this proposal is what an English man will call gall and what the Yiddish will say chutzpah. You know what chutzpah is? Someone who kills his mother and father and then is being sentenced to death and pleads for leniency on grounds of being an orphan. Na who cause am?

“If Ken was genuine, when the Attorney General came with this legal opinion, which at the Commonwealth, has the force of a high court order, he would have taken this document and gone to the IMF if indeed it’s the IMF telling him to do that… we say cut your expenditure, Ken is saying, ok, let’s do this program and is badly thought-out, not carefully thought through,” he said.

Kwame Pianim further stated that the country is being led into a situation that can only be described as being placed on a timebomb and that would plunge the citizens into a debt crisis that will last for decades.

He also said that the debt exchange program will stifle the growth of the economy of Ghana.

“I’m saying so because it is. You know, he says, short term but this debt exchange program is like a time bomb that Ken is putting on this economy. For the next thirty to forty years, you are going to suffer for it. It’s a timebomb because he’s squeezing billions of cedis from this economy. This economy cannot grow,” he said.

AE/WA