The
Vice-President of the Islamic University, Dr Gamel Nasser Adam, has stated that
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cannot solve the country’s economic
difficulties.
He explained that the IMF’s loyalty was to its main sponsors and multinational
corporations for whom it endeavoured to create the right environment to enable
them to accumulate profits globally without state restrictions.
“It presents a façade of assisting the client country to maintain general
financial discipline, restore the balance of payments equilibrium and solve the
debt crisis through debt rescheduling and more loans,” he said.
Forum
Dr Adam was speaking at a public forum organised by Arise Ghana, a pressure
group, on the theme: “Ghana’s socio-economic outlook, the prospects of an IMF
programme” last Wednesday. It was attended by some students from the University
of Ghana, Accra Technical University and the Ghana Institute of Management
and Public Administration (GIMPA), as well as the Kwame Nkrumah University of
Science and Technology (KNUST).
He stated that the unstated objective of the IMF was to enforce an
international division of labour in which the industrialised capitalist
countries monopolised manufacturing, technology and finance capital, while
developing countries were pinned down to primary agricultural production
to serve as an enclave for the extraction of raw materials.
“This is done through lower prices for Africa’s exports, higher prices for our
imports from the advanced industrialised countries, high-interest rate payments
and other strategies,” he explained.
No prospects
For his part, the Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jr,
said there were no prospects in the country’s agenda of going to the IMF for a
bailout. “There is no country in the world that has gone to the IMF and has
managed to solve its economic problems,” he added.
He, therefore, urged the government to fundamentally restructure the economy in
a manner that ensured the people could produce their own necessities in order
to solve the country’s problems The National Democratic Congress (NDC)
Member of Parliament for Bolgatanga Central, Isaac Adongo, said there was the
need for institutional and structural reforms to sustain the growth of the
economy.
“When we look at the trajectory of our economic paradigm, we have always had
growth but we have been unable to sustain it,” he said. He, therefore, called
for institutional reforms which would strengthen Parliament’s oversight
responsibility to protect the interest of the people and sustain economic
growth.
Source: graphic.com.gh