<<Print>>Financial analyst, Sydney Casely Hayford claims the Bank of Ghana (BoG)doesn’t know exactly what is wrong with the Ghanaian currency, the cedi, which results in it’s continuous depreciation against the major trading currencies.
“If the Bank of Ghana understood what the problem is, they would have solved it all these years [since the problem is perennial] but they don’t know” he insisted. The BoG had said it was intervening in the currency market with $20 million daily to stabilise the cedi. The move worked for a few weeks, only for the cedi to start it’s nose-dive again. Sydney Casely Hayford had earlier downplayed the impact of the move by the BoG saying, “they are lying to us, they can’t afford $20 million a day.” “If you have $600 million, why are we going to take $918 million from the IMF? It’s not possible.
The Bank of Ghana cannot make $600 million in a month,” he said. Speaking on Citi FM’s news analysis programme, The Big Issue on Saturday, Mr. Casely Hayford accused the BoG of being unable to identify the problems affecting the economy. “A lot of businesses complained that the artificial announcement [of the injection of US$20 million daily] and the inability of government to sustain it has simply resulted in them losing lots of Cedis because this has not translated immediately into the reduction of the cost of living and operation,” he said.
He argued that “if the Central Bank understood this economy and knew what to do they would have fixed the problem. But because they don’t all we are getting is knee-jerk reactions of what to do and how to fix it.” Meanwhile, Franklin Cudjoe, president of policy think tank, IMANI Ghana, disagreed with Casely Hayford’s assertion saying the Bank of Ghana does not know what is wrong with the cedi but blamed the matter on government’s lack of fiscal discipline and voracious appetite for borrowing.
As at last Friday, the Cedi was selling at GHc3.90 to $1, 4.28 to the Euro and 6.05 to the pound.