Story: Yaw Takyi

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) Caucus in Parliament has expressed shock about a press statement from the Bank of Ghana dated 9th August, 2023 which purports to respond to their demanding the resignation of the governor of the Central Bank.

According to the Minority Leader,Ato Forson, BoG in the said statement attempted to justify its recklessness and mismanagement which resulted in the huge losses of GHS60.8 billion and the negative equity of GHS55.1 billion it recorded in the year 2022.

As a matter of fact, the minority said, the Bank of Ghana’s unsigned press statement,  was full of deliberate distortions and flimsy justifications which did not address the serious matters that were raised in their Moment of Truth presser last Tuesday.

To this end, Minority noted that; “the references Bank of Ghana’s statement does not address the most fundamental issue which has to do with the printing of money by BoG for the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia/NPP government in 2021 and 2022 in clear contravention of Section 30 of the Bank of Ghana (Amendment) Act, 2016 (ACT 918). Indeed, throughout the statement, BOG does not and could not have offered any reasonable justification for printing a whopping GHS35 billion in 2021 and GHS42 billion in 2022 to finance the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia/NPP government, in clear breach of their governing law”.

 It is an indisputable fact,according to the NDC MPs that,  the amount of monies printed by BOG for the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government both in 2021 and 2022 far exceeded the legally acceptable threshold of 5% of the previous fiscal years’ total revenue.

The minority in a statement signed by its leader, Dr Cassiel Ato Forsonand copied to the media claimed that the Bank did that without cognizance of the legal duty imposed on the Governor of BoG to inform the Minister of Finance, who is required upon notification from the Governor of BoG to notify Parliament of the attainment of the 5% threshold and/or the setting of a new limit of government’s borrowing.

“Indeed, the facts show that BoG acted as law unto itself by willfully engaging in the illegal printing of monies to finance the recklessness of the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia/NPP government both in 2021 and 2022”, the statement said.

It added: “This illegal conduct of the Governor of BoG constitutes a criminal offense under section 67 of the Bank of Ghana Act and cannot be wished away by the flimsy justifications mounted by the Bank in the multiple press statements they have issued in the last couple of days”.

The minority’s statement went on to say that, contrary to claims by the Governor of the Central Bank and his deputies that they were committed to promoting a cash-lite economy, they had been printing higher denominations of new GHS100 and GHS200 notes.

“This together with the large injections of money into the economy caused currency-outside-banks to increase from GH¢14 billion in 2019 to GHȼ31.4 billion by 2022, representing an increase of over 124%”.

While the BoG kept increasing its policy rate and undertaking these injections at the same time, the minority further claimed they knew very well that their actions could spike inflation and result in the Bank incurring significant costs.

“As a direct consequence of the illegal printing of monies by the Bank of Ghana, the rate of inflation in the country spiraled to hyper levels last year, when Ghana recorded a high inflation rate of 54.1% in December 2022.