[ 2012-05-03 ]

Moses Asaga

Bawumia misled Ghanaians by comparing tomatoes with oranges - Asaga
The Minister of Employment and Social Welfare,
Moses Asaga, has analysed the state of the economy
address by the NPP’s vice presidential candidate,
Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, and concluded that “he
misled Ghanaians with false figures.”

Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Thursday,
Hon. Asaga said the former governor of the Bank of
Ghana ended up massaging World Bank and IMF
figures to dent the image of the ruling National
Democratic Congress (NDC).

He said: “Bawumia is behaving as if an economy is
just managed on only daily basis. He knows very
well that interest rates have fallen. For him to
be saying that lending rates have not come down,
that is not correct. Lending rates are moving.
Treasury rates are now in single digits.”

“How can he say the low inflation does not reflect
in interest rates?... Exchange rates started
depreciating in the last four weeks… Dr. Bawumia
should not be a scarecrow, but must have
confidence that these are short-term as far as the
exchange rates are concerned,” Hon. Asaga added.

The Member of Parliament for Nabdam said Dr.
Bawumia could have done a fair analysis of the
economy if he had taken off his NPP propaganda
cloak. However, he said, the NPP running mate
deceived Ghanaians with false figures to score
political points.

“Dr. Bawumia, who is an economist, has suddenly
been laced with NPP propaganda and so because of
that he has left a few of the standard economy he
used to churn out when he was a governor. So you
can see that a lot of his pointers are more
popularism incline just to get applause from his
supporters.

“Bawumia was comparing tomatoes with oranges. He
goes back to 2000 to change figures, which at that
time I was a member of the board of the Central
Bank. He was literally head of research and we had
confidence in him to advice on macroeconomic and
monetary policies. So if he is now churning
figures indicating that macroeconomic figures were
seriously distorted then what was he doing in that
bank?” Hon. Asaga quizzed.

“Whiles he was using the IMF and World Bank
figures of 2000-1 to argue his point about how
economic indicators were distorted; when it comes
to 2008-9 he refused to use the same World Bank
and IMF figures that showed how this economy was
messed up in two years.

“He was massaging figures. The commodity figures
he was churning were false. When it comes to
2008-9 he depressed and compressed some of the
prices of some of these important goods and
services. For example, maize never sold at GhC20
at end of 2008, but was selling between GhC 40-50.
Today, he says in 2012 maize is selling at GhC150.
He has only taken the upper point and not the
average.”

The legislator remarked: “He has misled Ghanaians
by saying that we are rather in triple digit
inflation. Inflation is calculated on a year by
year basis. As a reputable economist he shouldn’t
let the clout of NPP let him lose sight of the way
inflation is calculated.”

Listen to excerpts of Hon. Asaga's interview with
Bernard Avle in the attached audio (above)

Source - Citifmonline

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