J .H. Mensah Explains Ghana’s Debt Situation

Senior minister, Joseph Henry Mensah says Ghana's debt now stands at 4 billion US dollars, but was quick to add, “but decreasing due to tuning of the real debt rearrangement”.

The senior minister also explained how they came to borrow so much. “If you go down the list, you will find that we have borrowed a lot of money potentially for the use of things basically, the building of roads for agricultural purposes, water supply systems and so on and so forth”, Hon. Mensah stressed.

The minister identified the problems as two-fold where he said “one when you build those facilities, they must contribute to your productivity. It does not matter how much you owe the other but the ability to be able to pay back what you owe. According to Hon. Mensah, there was nothing wrong with borrowing because in his view “the whole financial system exists to lend money and its part of the economic system. You are entitled to borrow, if you have credit.

“However”, in the opinion of senior minister Mensah, “what has happened is that at some point in time; our debt stock has exceeded our ability to service that debt, to pay the interest and make capital repayment on the debt if we cannot repay.” And to go back to what I was saying about our productivity, a country of about 20milion people, our land surface area is as big as Britain, so we ought not be bothered by public debts of $10bilion”, the senior minister said. Instead he said, “what we need to do is to grow into a higher capacity to use credit productivity to produce more and keep multiplying”.