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Internationally acclaimed investment advisory firm, Ernst & young has hailed the current administration of president John Dramani Mahama of what it calls a “strong Governance Track Record”.

Ernst and Young (E&Y) captured this in its latest report titled The Africa Attractiveness index where it assessed the growth prospect of several African countries. “The North African countries of Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, as well as Ghana, in West Africa remain under some pressure economically, but have the advantage of a relatively business-friendly environment, good infrastructure and , in the case of Ghana, a strong governance track record,” the international investment advisory firm stated in a statement released on Wednesday.

This international accolade is coming at a time when a team of representatives from the international monetary fund (IMF) are in the country to assess the prudence of Government’s economic management.

The opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) has frantically mounted a campaign to discredit the administration with allegations of financial impropriety, the latest being Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia’s (the vice presidential candidate of the NPP) widely debunked allegation that the government had diverted some USS$250 million Eurobond funds into a private UBA account for the Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund (GIIF).

The ministry of Finance has debunked the allegations saying Dr. Buwumia was only being mischievous by whipping the transaction out of proportion. The Ministry in a statement released on Tuesday, explained how the transaction was duly backed by the legislations that set up the GIIF.

Critics say Dr. Bawumia’s antics fit into the NPP agenda to paint a gloomy picture of the Ghanaian economy particularly at this critical time when the IMF was is assessing the Ghanaian economy.

But Ernst and Young has indicated that the IMF would possibly disregard these out-of-proportion negative prescriptions for the economy by the NPP because there is a currently general global economic slowdown that has hit African countries the hardest.

Economic growth across the region is likely to remain slower in coming years than it has been over the past 10 to 15 years. The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) baseline projection for 2016 is now down to 3% from what was a forecasted 6.1% in April 2015,” E&Y stated.

“The main reasons for a relative slowdown are not unique to Africa and are the same as those weighing down the global economy: a general slowdown in emerging market economies, and in a particular the rebalancing of China’s economy; ongoing stagnation in most developed economies; lower commodity prices, and higher borrowing costs,”

However, E&Y quickly noted that despite the slowdown, African countries would still grow faster than the global average. “However, although growth in region has relatively slowed, two-thirds of Sub-Saharan African economies are still growing at rates above the global average, and will remain the second fastest of the foreseeable future, after Emerging Asia. This is further supported by the year-on-year increase in FDI project numbers in Africa in 2015 that occurred in a context in which the total number of FDI projects globally dropped by 5%. In fact, Africa was one of only two regions in the world in which there was growth in the number of FDI projects over the past year,” it stated.

This has estimations by E&Y has conforms to the optimism of policy makers in the Mahama administration. The optimism also comes in the wake of assurances given by other international financial institutions about the growth potential of the Ghanaian economy and the home grown policies adopted by Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) government yielding positive results.