New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) vice presidential candidate, Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia, is questioning the relevance of the Senchi Forum held in May 2014 since the decisions arrived at are yet to be implemented.
Speaking on US based Sahara TV, Dr. Bawumia said the Mahama led administration’s enchi forum was a façade.
In May 2014, the government organized a national economic forum in which experts from the various sectors of the economy, political parties’ representatives and the leadership of labour unions met to deliberate on the effective ways of dealing with the nation’s socio-economic challenges.
The NPP however boycotted the forum, citing the late delivery of invitation as the primary cause for their decision.
The forum ended with the adoption of a 22-point communiqué, called the “Senchi Consensus.”
The Minority Members of Parliament (MPs) questioned the effectiveness of the consensus saying, it failed to address the core issue of corruption which is hurting the country’s economy.
According to Dr. Bawumia, although the NPP received heavy public backlash for critiquing the consensus, “the events after Senchi have proven us right.”
He said: “Senchi came out with a 22-point recommendation. Now you ask yourself how many of the 22 recommendations have been implemented.”
The former Deputy Bank of Ghana (BoG) Governor pointed out that one of the key recommendations out of the Senchi report was that taxes will no longer be increased in order to reduce the tax burden on Ghanaians and also recommended that new mechanisms should be devised to widen the tax net.
“This was the key recommendation out if Senchi. Immediately after that, they went for the budget and what happened was that they increased all sorts of taxes and in 2015, they have increased again, all sorts of taxes so this Senchi was supposed to be the considered opinion of our experts and now you’ve totally ignored that so what was it for?” he queried.
Dr. Bawumia stressed that the NPP really doesn’t “think it was a sincere effort to bring consensus in the management of the economy.”
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