finance minister Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson has taken a swipe at the Akufo-Addo administration’s debt restructuring programme, describing it as poorly designed, cancerous, and fundamentally unfair.
Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express on Thursday, July 22, shortly after presenting the 2025 Mid-Year Fiscal Policy Review to Parliament, Dr. Forson questioned the very foundation of the debt overhaul he inherited.
“First of all, the debt restructuring for me was not well structured. It was very badly structured,” he told host Evans Mensah. “I say so in the sense that, you would ask, why do you restructure your debt and create such a hump?”
He implied that the restructuring’s design raised concerns about the motives behind it.
“Are you setting someone up to fail? No one restructures a debt like this. Because restructuring a debt by creating this kind of humps can be cancerous.”
According to the Finance Minister, such an approach could have severe consequences for the country’s economic stability.
“It can set the country back to another economic disaster like we saw in 2022.”
Dr. Forson dismissed the idea that the debt restructuring gave his administration any fiscal relief.
“So the debt restructuring that they [NPP] did, I can’t give them credit,” he declared.
He also criticised the aspect of the restructuring that affected pensioners.
“You do a debt restructuring to the extent that you deny pensioners of their savings and their dignity—[that] cannot be said to be a good debt restructuring.”
Blaming the crisis on excessive borrowing, he said, “Why is it that government should have gone into debt restructuring when it was avoidable in the first place? It is because the Akufo-Addo government borrowed and borrowed until Ghana could not pay its debt.”
He concluded by painting a grim picture of the consequences.
“They borrowed and borrowed until the needs of the citizens and then the needs of the creditors collided. That is not the kind of governance we want to do for you.”
Source: Abubakar Ibrahim
