The Finance Minister’s statement to Parliament on Ghana’s economic performance came under sharp attack yesterday, with the opposition contending that the government’s stability story is contradicted by its own official data on jobs and the cost of living.
Responding to the minister on the floor of the house, Mr. Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, MP for Ofoase Ayeribi and Ranking Member on Parliament’s Economy and Development Committee, told colleagues that youth unemployment now stands at 40 percent, according to the Ghana Statistical Service Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the third quarter of 2025.
That figure, he said, is higher than what the Mahama government inherited on taking office.
For Ghanaians aged 15 to 24, the rate rose from 32 percent in December 2024 to 32.5 percent by September 2025. In Greater Accra the situation is worse still, with youth unemployment reaching 49.3 percent.
“On average, one out of two people you meet on the streets of Greater Accra is unemployed,” Mr. Oppong Nkrumah said. With seven in ten Ghanaians under the age of 35, he argued, the jobs crisis is the defining economic reality for most of the country, not a footnote to a broader recovery.
The minister had led his statement with an inflation rate of 3.5 percent as evidence of macroeconomic progress.
Behind that headline figure, he told Parliament, service costs are rising, rents are going up and electricity has become more expensive — the everyday bills Ghanaians simply cannot escape.
These are the costs Ghanaians cannot avoid. “The Ghanaian is asking: this whole stability, how is it impacting lives at the end of the day?”
He also took apart the government’s tax record. The Finance Minister had highlighted taxes abolished under the administration, but Mr Oppong Nkrumah reminded Parliament that the same government had brought eight new taxes before the house, had them passed into law, and still failed to meet its own revenue to GDP targets.
The shortfall, he said, is why the government cannot honour its expenditure commitments, yet turns around and calls this fiscal discipline.
His sharpest rebuke was reserved for what he described as the minister’s misrepresentation of Ghana’s relationship with the International Monetary Fund.
The statement, he said, was crafted to leave the impression that Ghana has exited the IMF programme.
It has not. The government is moving towards a Policy Coordination Instrument, a different arrangement that carries no balance of payments financing.
He called on the government to be candid with Ghanaians about what the PCI means and what it does not provide.
“We hear the minister when he rattles the numbers here,” Mr. Oppong Nkrumah said. “But the numbers the Ghanaian people are watching in their day to day lives are getting worse.”
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