Owing to the economic challenges that have hit the country,the government is holding series of crunch meetings to dialogue and proffer solutions to mitigate the crisis.
Minister of Information, Mr Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, disclosed this at a news conference in Accra yesterday.
The Economic Management Team (EMT), met yesterday and is continuing today to discuss recommendations it has received on how to tackle some of the crisis the country is facing currently.
“…The EMT is also meeting to appraise itself of the latest numbers as have been put together and some of the recommendations as we get into the final part of the year.”
Last but not the least among these series of meetings will be a cabinet meeting that would take place from Thursday, October 27 to Saturday, October 29, 2022 where the President will receive a briefing from the Economic Management Team on the decisions it arrived at during its meeting on Monday.
The Finance Minister is also expected to brief the President about the ongoing negotiations with the International Monetary Fund.
The President, based on these briefings put together will seek to proffer some solutions with his team and update Ghanaians accordingly.
Minister Oppong Nkrumah, however, noted that these measures will be implemented together with existing measures, such as the numerous budget cut that was announced during the first quarter of the year.
It would be recalled that in March 2022, government approved a 30% salary reduction for all Cabinet Ministers and heads of State-Owned Enterprises, effective April, 2022 till the year ends.
The Central Bank is also expected to hold a meeting with managing directors of some banks in the country, as well as heads of Forex Bureau Associations to first of all ensure that the supply of forex onto the market is stabilised, the Minister said.
He again said that the meeting is intended to birth measures that will see to the halting of overpricing of forex, to enable businessmen and women who genuinely need forex for trading to get access to them at reasonable rates.
With so much speculations going on about forex rates, which has skyrocketed the dollar and brought the cedi to its knees, Mr Oppong Nkrumah expressed confidence that the meeting can be used to dispel those speculations and direct Ghanaians where to obtain knowledge on actual forex rates.
Mr Oppong Nkrumah noted that the overall objective of the meeting will be for the three groups to find longer lasting measures to ensure that forex trading is stabilised in the country.
He, however, noted that Ghanaians should expect more inflow of forex when the Ghana Cocobod completes work on the Cocoa Syndicated loan, following the signing of the $1.13 billion loan to finance the purchase of cocoa beans for the 2022/2023 crop season.
The government also imposed a moratorium on official vehicle purchases and foreign travel without prior approval and introduced a 50% cut in and fuel coupon allocations for all political appointees and heads of government institutions, including SOEs.
But while the President and his cabinet members busy themselves with how to resolve the current economic crisis, on Thursday Former President John Dramani Mahama is also expected to deliver an address on matters concerning the economic.
The information was made public by the former President’s aide, Joyce Bawah Mogtari, in a Twitter post yesterday.
“John Mahama speaks on Ghana’s collapsed economy and the unprecedented hardships sweeping across the land and the way forward, on Thursday 27 October, at 7pm,”she wrote on her page
