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Government urged
to “bite the bullet”
Accra, April 30, Ghanadot/GNA – Mr
Tony Oteng-Gyasi, President of Association of Ghana Industries (AGI),
on Thursday urged the government to discipline itself and
implement its policies despite some foreseeable undesirable
consequence to its future political fortunes.
“Government must bite the bullet and implement its policies to
move the country forward in spite of the short-term resistance
from the public on some of the hard decisions,” he said.
Mr Oteng-Gyasi made the remark at a day’s roundtable on the 2009
Budget Statement, jointly organised by the World Bank and the
Department of Economics of the University of Ghana.
The workshop, which focused on the ways to make the budget work
for the country’s good in the midst of the global financial
recession, was attended by representatives from both the private
and public sectors.
Mr Oteng-Gyasi noted that since the inception of the Fourth
Republic, the economic challenges of the country and suggested
solutions, as per government policies in the various annual
budget statements, had not changed much, but the problem had
been with the implementation of the policies.
He said governments often feared the public resistance to the
hard decisions vis-à-vis its own future political fortune and
therefore reneged on their commitment to implement policies.
“This is because government does not do much to sell the
policies to the people. We can learn from the United States,
where the president himself goes round explaining to the people
why they needed to spend their way out of the recession and for
that there is minimal public resistance to his famous US$700
billion relief plan.”
Mr Oteng-Gyasi also urged the government to enact laws to back
specific projects and programmes in order that government itself
would be bound to undertake those projects to move the national
development agenda forward.
On budget estimation, he said: “We must move away from the usual
practice and begin our current budgets with the actuals of the
previous budget in order to paint a more realistic picture for
the future.”
Giving an overview of the 2009 budget, Professor Newman Kwadwo
Kusi, Director of Budget at the Ministry of Finance and Economic
Planning (MOFEP), agreed with Mr. Oteng-Gyasi that
implementation of government policies had been a challenge due
to a myriad of factors.
He explained that as high as 56.6 per cent of total government
spending went into statutory payments, including salaries, debt
servicing, payments into various government funds, and the
government was only left with the remainder of the budget to run
the economy.
Added to the inadequacy of the budget to meet government
expenditure, huge leakages in the direct revenue sector,
financial indiscipline in most ministries, departments and
agencies (MDAs), among other things, broke the back of the
government, he said.
For instance out of 600,000 registered profit-making
organisations, only 140,000 were active and just s little over
half of that number had been captured in the IRS tax net.
“We are working on roping in the other half to double direct
revenue within the shortest possible,” Prof. Kusi said.
He said the way forward was to streamline the salary structure
and reduce government spending by cutting down subsidies and
other non-profitable spending.
Prof. Kusi also announced measures put in place to ensure that
the government delivered on its promises in the budget; but
called on the public to come along with the government both in
good and in bad times.
GNA
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