Inflation Figures Challenged

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has officially written to the Government Statistician, Dr. Grace Bediako, to furnish it with details of all items in the inflation basket of the monthly Retail Market Prices from January to May, this year. �For sometime now, there has been considerable public interest in the relationship between, on the one hand, the inflation rates put out by the Ghana Statistical Service, and on the other hand, the prices of items on the market. �To contribute to this important public discussion, the New Patriotic Party respectfully requests to be furnished with the monthly Retail Market Prices (from January to May of this year) of all items in the inflation basket,� the party noted in the letter signed by its policy advisor, Kwaku Kwarteng. In a follow up interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Kwarteng, who is also the NPP parliamentary candidate for Obuasi in Ashanti region, said information they are getting from the people who patronize items listed in the inflation basket is that the prices are moving up faster, but the inflation figures from the Ghana Statistical Service indicate that the prices are moving up rather slowly. According to Kwaku Kwarteng, it is an attempt to reconcile the information they are getting from the people and what is being put out by the Statistical Service that they have decided to write to Dr. Grace Bediako to furnish them with the real figures. He noted that after the receipt of the relevant information from Grace Bediako�s outfit, the NPP will then sit down to do critical analysis of the figures, to see if they are genuine or otherwise. When asked whether NPP has doubts about the figures being put out by the Government Statistician, Mr. Kwarteng, a former government spokesperson on finance during Kufuor�s regime replied that for now the party cannot draw that conclusion, until they are fed with the relevant information they are looking for. Inflation, which was hovering around 18.5% when the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government, led by President John Atta Mills took over the reins of the country in 2009, and later moved beyond the 20% mark, has now whittled down to 9.2%, a record the government has always been boasting of. The last time the government of Ghana achieved single digit inflation was in the late 90s. But leading members of the NPP have not been amused about these figures. The Communication Director for Nana Addo 2012 election campaign team, Nana Akomea, for instance, told The Chronicle in an interview on Monday that the low inflation figures does not reflect on the realities on the ground.He contended that the prices of goods and services are going up at a rapid rate, yet the GSS keeps on releasing low inflation figures. He also did not understand why interest rate should be hovering around 28% when inflation has dropped to a single digit. To him, if the figures reflect the realities on the ground, the banks would have followed suit by charging low interest rates on loans taken by the customers.