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Seth Terkper, a former minister for finance under the Mahama administration, has said the country expected more from the vice-president’s address on the economy on Thursday (7 April).

Terkper said Dr Bawumia’s presentation at the TESCON event was an anticlimax.

He said the habit of talking about cost “without talking about the nuisance taxes that should have gone [which is the sacrifice that Ghanaians are making] is unfair to the people of Ghana because ESLA levies have been increased twice.”

Speaking on Asaase Radio Friday (8 April 2022), the former finance minister said, “I’m saying that we’re missing the opportunity to attend to the next crisis through the stabilization as a result of the arithmetic if you like the financial engineering that is currently taking place.”

He added that for the first time, “We have seen less bullishness. The Finance Minister has acknowledged that the country is going through a crisis. The president has also acknowledged that we’re going through a crisis; we heard that from the vice-president but as the head of the economic management team, he was to give us more than even the finance minister or the president…”

“When we had the single spine, the abrupt gas shortage from Nigeria which gave us the power crisis; when we had all of those things, my boss [President Mahama] acknowledged it and I went to Parliament to tell the country what we were going to do with it under his [Mahama’s] direction so that was what we expected,” he added.

“So if the vice-president was mounting the stage, for heaven’s sake [for five years] of managing the economy, you go back to 2016 to do comparisons? We expected an address to the nation, not to a partisan group … but the speech itself should have been more reflective.”

“We expected more and the presentation was just an anticlimax,” he added.