COVID-19 Audit report: Pandemic was pure harvest by Gov’t – ASEPA

The Executive Director of the Alliance For Social Equity and Public Accountability (ASEPA), Mensah Thompson, wants government to apologize to Ghanaians for the mismanagement of the economy under the guise of the ravages of Covid-19 pandemic.

“Of course there’s no doubt about the impact of Covid-19 on the private sector as a lot of the Covid measures brought about major disruptions in production as workers were on lockdown, supply chains were disrupted and most importantly sales of non-essential commodities was on a nosedive, but for Government a non-profit entity who only cashed-in on Covid-19 revenues it didn’t expect to receive but for Covid, to advance the Covid effect as the excuse of its mismanagement and wasteful was not only deceitful but dangerous and the Government must apologize to the people of this Country,” Mensah Thompson wrote in a post.

The Auditor-General has disclosed that the government spent ¢10 billion of monies mobilised for Covid-19 activities on budget support.

According to the A-G, a total of ¢21,844,189,185.24 was mobilised for the fight against the pandemic.

However, out of this amount, only ¢11,750,683,059.11 was spent on curbing the spread of the virus.

“Out of ¢21,844,189,185.24 mobilised, ¢11,750,683,059.11 was spent on Covid-19 activities and the rest on budget support.

“On Covid-19 activities, we noted that ¢8,658,496,124.96 was spent in 2020, ¢3,084,311,725.45 in 2021, and ¢7,875,208.70 in 2022 to mitigate the impact of coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic in Ghana,” excerpt of the report said.

Commenting on the development, the ASEPA Boss reiterated that Covid-19 on the economic front was nothing but a pure harvest by the government.

“Now here’s the catch, Covid-19 brought Government GHC10billion additional revenue to support its annual budgets for 2020 and 2021, in the same period Government raised $1billion annually from the Capital market to support its budget, oil revenues also brought in additional $5.4billion, not forgetting proceeds from taxes like CST, ESLA etc.

“How on earth were we fed the narrative that Covid-19 wrecked the Ghanaian economy when all it did was to bring in contingency revenues to GoG?

Source:Starrfm.com.gh