By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. English Department, SUNY-Nassau Garden City, New York February 11, 2017 E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The question was posed to me by Mr. Quaison (I hope I have his surname name spelt out correctly), the host of the Klasik Radio Ghanaian community-oriented program of which I am a weekly contributor. The program, mostly focused on Ghanaian politics and national policy matters, originates from Georgia, right here in the United States, and can be heard on most Sunday afternoons between 4 and 6 via the Internet. On the program, Mr. Quaison is affectionately called “Daddy Kay.”

The question regarded the GH? 7 billion expenditure which the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) had either deliberately hidden somewhere in its transitional handover notes – perhaps in a bid to making its exit record seem nostalgically sanguine than the practical reality on the ground indicated, or perhaps it was a strategic scorch-earth warring technique by which the outgoing regime hoped to make governance extremely difficult for the incoming Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) – (See “Bawumia Finds GH? 7 Billion Undisclosed Expenditure by NDC Gov’t” Graphic.com.gh / Ghanaweb.com 1/31/17).

Anyway, at the time that Klasik Radio’s Daddy Kay posed the 7 Billion-Cedi Question to yours truly, I had just printed out a couple of rather brief and scarcely informative local news stories on the same which I had yet to carefully read, critically examine and digest; and so I could only promise to be back with an informed opinion on the matter the following week by which, of course, I meant tomorrow, February 12. Well, by the time I regale my Klasik Radio audience with my take on the matter early tomorrow evening, this piece would have already been published by at least one of the Ghanaian media websites on which my political and cultural commentaries regularly appear.

At any rate, what fascinated me most about this matter was the rather characteristically cavalier rejoinder presented by Mr. Ato Forson, in which the second of the two former Deputy Finance Ministers of the Mahama regime claimed that a new system for capturing government expenditures had been installed at the Finance Ministry which was, somehow, too complex or sophisticated for the Oxbridge-schooled Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia to understand. The new system, called Ghana Integrated Financial Management Information Systems (GIFMIX), according to Mr. Forson, ensured that government expenditures would almost immediately be captured on the pink-sheet side of the ledger, thus putting a hitherto tardy government accounting system literally on its toes.

The previous system, according to Mr. Forson, took between three to six months to register onto the government’s database. Which immediately contradicts and exposes Mr. Forson for the scam-artist extraordinaire and a clinical liar that he clearly appears to be. Well, we have decided to call him a liar or lying scam-artist extraordinaire because if it is, indeed, true that the GIFMIX system of expenditure accounting, or recording, almost instantaneously records government expenditures into its central database, then it perfectly stands to reason to concur with Alhaji Bawumia that the recently uncovered GH? 7 Billion expenditure or deficit spending by the erstwhile Mahama government (which is approximately $1.6 billion), was deliberately hidden from the incoming Akufo-Addo Administration (See “GH? 7 Billion Not Missing; Dr. Bawumia Does Not Understand Gov’t Systems – Minority” Modernghana.com 2/1/17).

What further firms up or confirms the foregoing belief or stance, is the fact that the alleged spending deficit covers the 2014-15 and 2015-16 fiscal years, which means that there existed more than ample time for GIFMIX to have captured this expenditure into the central government’s database (See “Ghana Finds a $1.6 Billion Hole in Budget” Bloomberg News/Modernghana.com 2/1/17). Even as Mr. Courage Martey of the Accra-based Databank Group recently opined, there may yet exist other NDC-planted expenditure mines that have yet to be uncovered by Dr. Bawumia and Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta, Ghana’s newly appointed Finance Minister.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs