Russia-Ukraine crisis, Covid-19 affected us, we received monies but we saw it as an opportunity to embezzle funds through fishy contracts — Sulemana Braimah

Executive Director of the Media Foundation for West Africa has acknowledged the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war and Covid-19 on the Ghanaian economy.

According to him, although the two external factors contributed, mismanagement is the reason the economy is on its knees.

Speaking on the news review on Joy News’ ‘AM show’ he noted that monies received at the peak of Covid-19 were misused.

“First of all Russia-Ukraine and the global crisis is something that one cannot wish away at all. Indeed the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had some global effect on economies, food prices, fuel prices and I don’t think we are an island to that effect so we have also been hit to some extent.

“Beyond that, the global crisis emanating from Covid and others, even in the US, UK the advanced societies inflation is going up, prices have gone up and all of that so certainly there has been an impact on us from all of that. However, it’s about how we have managed our own affairs.

“When you look at Covid for example, which we blame for some of the issues that we have; yes, industries, hotels a lot of them were shut down, the tourist sector shut down and all of that, but we had a significant amount of money from the crisis.

“IMF alone gave us about US $2.4 billion. The World Bank has said it gave hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of the pandemic. How did we manage that? We messed up.

“We saw it as an opportunity to amass wealth, to dissipate resources and to embezzle funds through funny schemes like say providing hot meals to the poor and awarding fishy contracts for fumigation when we knew that fumigation cannot do anything in the context of what was happening.

“We saw it as an opportunity to embezzle funds through fishy contracts and all of that. And so yes, we can talk about global crisis, but we had our opportunity during the crisis and we messed it up,” he emphasised.