Gov’t to set up c’ttee to investigate foreign exchange regime – Ofori Atta

The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta has said that a committee will be set up to assess the foreign exchange regime of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

The Vice President, Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia on Wednesday reiterated that the NPP government has stabilised the economy and has put measures in place to maintain it.

Speaking to Bernard Avle on the Citi Breakfast show, the Finance Minister said that the government has about five months import cover to keep the economy stable.

“We are setting up a committee to fundamentally look at foreign exchange regime to see how we can take out the noises. I suspect the fact that the past months have been quite historic. I am not sure we have experienced this type of variation of cedi depreciation and appreciation. So clearly there is some element that has entered, because generally in a quarter of each year you have these pressure from exporters, making good the payment they have to make”.

“But as I explained about three weeks ago, we were pretty comfortable with the reserves that are expected which are 300 million from COCOBOD another 600 million. As you know we were very successful with Eurobond so for the first time, we have about five months of import cover, somewhere around 9 billion. At this point, we would have created the type of stability that is required,” he said.

At a town hall meeting on Wednesday, Vice President, Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia used the Mahama administration as a yardstick to measure the NPP’s performance.

Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia said the governing New Patriotic Party has performed creditably well compared to the Mahama administration in stabilizing the cedi against major trading currencies.

He also said the worst performance of the cedi under the Akufo-Addo government is far above the best performance of the cedi under the Mahama government.

“The data on the annual rate of depreciation of the cedi in recent years shows that the worst performance so far under the NPP government is the 8.4 percent depreciation we saw in 2018. That worst performance is better than the best performance under the previous government between 2012 and 2016,” The Vice President said.