The New Patriotic Party (NPP) is already concerned the 2016 budget to be delivered by Minister of Finance Seth Emmanuel Terkper in Parliament on Friday, November 13 may be strewn with policies that will perpetuate corruption.
According to the opposition party, since 2016 is an election year there could be a playback of 2012 “where sole sourcing government contracts were done, costs of contracts inflated, all under a deadly culture of ‘create, loot and share’”.
At a press conference to call the attention of the president to corruption within the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), Acting Chairman of the NPP Freddie Blay on Wednesday expressed the feeling of the party ahead of the Finance Minister’s delivery.
“It makes us justifiably nervous.”
Ghana’s 2016 budget is expected to capture policies under the extended credit facility of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Already, President John Dramani Mahama has given the assurance that government will not overspend in 2016 and will stick to the three-year IMF programme.
But Mr Blay said: “A key aim of the budget/IMF bailout is the control of public expenditure to avoid the horrendous experience of reckless spending we saw in 2012, which has brought years of untold hardship on the people, cost the cedi to fall heavily, collapsed businesses, created mass unemployment, piled up huge arrears and debt repayments, all forcing us to go for the IMF in the first place.
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