Ghana’s former president and flagbearer of the largest opposition party, John Dramani Mahama has indicated that his government will negotiate certain conditionalities of Ghana’s ongoing IMF programme should he win the upcoming December 7 polls.

JohnMahama who himself as president in 2015 engaged the fund on a 3-year programme has affirmed he does not desire to exit the programme hastily as the programme is needed for the economy.

“We will not cancel the IMF policy. It is a policy that our government has signed on to and they signed on behalf of Ghana. Indeed when the crises was reaching epic proportions we actually asked them to go to the IMF for support because this economy was going to crash and it would have crash with severe consequences.”, he told journalists at a media encounter on Sunday July 7, 2024.

Mr. Mahama asserts the hesitance by the government in engaging the IMF resulted in a raw deal for the country.

“Eventually we told them that if you don’t go there walking you will go in an ambulance and eventually they went in an ambulance. And so the conditionalities are more stringent than if we had gone much earlier.”

“So as a new government that comes, we will immediately have to sit with the IMF, look at the conditionalities that were given and see how we can tweak them to suit our present circumstances.”, he said.

“Things are clearer now, because at the time they signed the agreement the debt restructuring had not been concluded. Today it has been concluded even with the international bondholders so we have a more predictable trajectory about how our loans are going to repaid”, he concluded.

On May 17, 2023 the IMF announced that it had approved a $3 billion Extended Credit Facility (ECF) for Ghana. The approval came 11 months after Ghana announced that it was seeking a program with the IMF to support its economic program. The IMF has since disbursed a total of $1.56 billion dollars to Ghana most recently a $360 million third tranche disbursement a month ago.