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The general debate on the 2015 budget ended on an abrasive note yesterday when the Minority Leader, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, said the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Parliament would compel the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government to meticulously account for the $27 billion (GH�60.5 billion) it had borrowed in the name of Ghanaians since it came to power in 2009. He said out of the $27 billion borrowed from domestic and external sources, only $3.5 billion had been accounted for by way of projects that the NDC government claims it is undertaking and therefore the government will have to be prepared to account for the remaining $23.5 billion that it has borrowed within its six-year reign. He indicated that the total cost of all the signature projects the NDC government had been trumpeting about, including the Kasoa interchange, amounts to $3.5 billion and wondered where the remaining $23.5 billion was. �Mr Speaker, we the Minority and for that matter Ghanaians, want to know what the remaining $23 billion of loans had been used for,� Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu demanded, stressing that the Minority in Parliament would file an urgent question for the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning to come to Parliament and provide the House and the people of Ghana with a comprehensive list of all the projects financed by domestic and external borrowing under the NDC government. Everybody Owes GH�3,500 According to the Minority Leader, every Ghanaian, including a new baby born today, owes a total of GH�3,500�increasing from GH�2,000 last year. He further indicated that the figure represented the end of last September and that by the end of this year, the country�s total debt would be GH�80 billion from the GH�9.5 billion that the NDC government inherited in 2009 from the NPP administration. Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu noted that the NDC government had been very lucky in terms of availability of resources, adding that apart from the huge amount of loans contracted, revenue inflows had increased with the inclusion of oil money and numerous taxes, while capital expenditure as percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) had drastically declined. �The country is over-borrowing and astronomically increasing debt stock which has crossed the 60% threshold of GDP,� he indicated, adding that if the current rate of borrowing continued the country would be plunged into the league of nations with high risk of debt distress which would disable the country from attracting financing from the international capital market. The Minority Leader explained that under the NPP government, the GDP growth rose from 3.7% to 8.4% in 2008 after rebasing the economy without the benefit of crude oil exports as compared to the downward trend of 4% in 2010 and to 6.9% with oil components under the NDC government. Cedi Free Fall He said under the NPP, the cedi depreciated by 53 percent but under the NDC it had depreciated by 195.5 percent in six years. He noted that the NDC government had been suppressing the truth about the real indicators of the economy and that in the West African sub-region and the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ), it is Ghana that has performed abysmally in terms of economic growth. �Mr Speaker, for the first time since I have been in Parliament, the Minister of Finance has refused to present the table of performance of the country in the WAMZ league in the budget document,� he said. He urged the NDC government, which stands for transparency, probity and accountability, to be fair to the people of this country in terms of the reality on the ground, stressing that the cardinal principle of good budgeting is transparency. The Majority Leader, Alban Bagbin, said the implementation of the Single Spine Salary Structure and various development projects springing up across the country under the NDC government, account for the huge loans the government had been contracting. �We will not sell national assets like the Ghana Railway Corporation and the Ghana Telecom as you did, but we will borrow to invest,� he said, adding that projects such as Sofoline Interchange, Bui Dam, Suhum-Nsawam, Achimota-Ofankor, Dansoman and Nungua roads which were left behind by the NPP government, had been financed by the NDC government and that some of the loans were also used to pay for such projects. Bagbin spoke about the need for the government to adequately resource the Electoral Commission, the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) and Parliament to play their constitutional roles effectively.