Upper East Regional Youth Organizer of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), Salahu-Deen Musah Al-Khomeini says it is incomprehensible attempts to downplay the ripple effect of Covid-19 and the Russia/Ukraine War on the country’s economy.
Speaking in an interview on State of Our Nation, Mr. Salahu-Deen noted that the restrictions imposed in the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic brought economic activities in the country to a halt.
This, he stated, eroded the progress the country had made in the management of its economy.
He said managers had almost put the economy back on track when the Russia-Ukraine War broke out, plunging the country into crisis.
These events and the debilitating effects they have had on the global economy including that of Ghana are evident, he added. He, thus, cannot wrap his head around why anybody will attempt to downplay their contributions to the prevailing crisis the country is facing.
“There wasn’t a time in this our Fourth Republic that the country has to come to a standstill. Market women had to be asked not go to market and so many things. So I am trying to understand why people are trying to kind of trivialize the effect that COVID had on this country,” he said.
He added, “People were asked to stay in the house and not go to work. Schools were closed. We all know the sectors of the economy and if all these sectors are shutdown, what do you expect? Clearly it must have an impact.
So if someone is saying COVID (isn’t the cause of the economic crisis), I tried to look at them and ask myself, do they really understand the components of an economy? Do they know that before you calculate your GDP, you have to look at the whole financial year to put it together to calculate that?”
Ghana is currently under an IMF programme following an economic turmoil which resulted in steeping rise in inflation and free fall of its currency.
The government blamed the situation on the ripple effects of Covid-19 and the Russia/Ukraine War but the opposition and some experts say it is a result of mismanagement.
