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Former President John Dramani Mahama has said the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II was instrumental in the country securing an Extended Credit Facility from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2016 to strengthen the economy.
 
Receiving the Otumfuo Commemorative Gold Coin at his office in Accra on Tuesday, February 8, 2022, he said when his government faced crisis with the economy in 2013/2014, Otumfuo was at hand to rescue the situation.
 
Home Grown Fiscal Programme
 
Giving details, President Mahama said, “We had implemented the single spine salary policy from President Mills' time and somewhere in 2013, the arrears were kicking in. So we overshot in terms of revenue which became a burden on the budget. Wages and salaries shot up astronomically so we did the Senchi forum and after that, we came out with the Home-Grown Fiscal Consolidation Programme.
 
“We tried to implement it but international investors thought that without discipline we could not do that. We tried to convince them nut they would not budge,” he stated.
 
Enter IMF
 
He continued that the government, therefore, decided that to get the credibility, it needed to go to the IMF to buy into the implementation of the home-grown fiscal programme.
However, Former President Mahama indicated that when his administration wanted to talk to the IMF they kept delaying.
 
President Mahama said one day during a visit to Kumasi, he called on Otumfuo Osei Tutu to enquire from him whether he could get his friend, the President of the World Bank Mr James D. Wolfensohn, for him to work on the IMF programme for the government and the Asantehene readily accepted the request.
 
“Because of that programme, he (Otumfuo) flew to Washington to have talks with Mr Wolfensohn, who together with Otumfuo went and spoke with the IMF Director, Madam Christine Lagarde and within a short period of time,  we had the Extended Credit Facility.
“That was the programme that turned the economy around because under that programme, in 2016, almost for the first time in our history,  we did not overspend the budget,” Mr Mahama said.