Opinion: Jinapor schools Boako over Bawumia’s cooked data

Viewers of today’s NewsFile programme have had more evidence to understand the IMF’s claim that the Nana Akufo-Addo government is now using fictitious economic data for deceptive reporting and analysis of its economic performance.

While the IMF disputed government’s data on International Reserves, Hon. Isaac Adongo, the MP for Bolgatanga Central has also pointed out several inconsistencies and deliberate distortions in government data reporting.

The NDC’s John Jinapor, further exposed these issues when he joined Dr. Gideon Boako, spokesperson of the vice president, and other panelists on today’s NewsFile to discuss the Policy Dialogue Series on the Energy Sector and the NPP’s Results Fair in Kumasi, all held within the week.
Hon. Jinapor explained cogently how the Petroleum Revenue Management Act (PRMA) was violated and same corroborated by the Public Interest Accountability Committee (PIAC).

In his attempt to speak for the government on critical issues raised by PIAC and mentioned by Hon. Jinapor, Dr. Boako, who speaks also for the Vice President, failed to show the exact sections in the PRMA which supports the government misconstrued views of the PRMA provisions. When quizzed further, Dr. Boako suddenly stated that the law was silent on what constituted social investments, especially in education.

Educationists have always considered infrastructure and service delivery in education as the provision of educational infrastructure as well as the libraries, laboratories, vestibules for technical and vocational learning, textbooks, among other logistics rather than just the payment of fees for students as the government is doing with the Annual Budgetary Funding Amount (ABFA).

On the economy, Hon. Jinapor read copiously from the government’s own 2020 Budget Statement in which the finance minister reported how the NDC’s records in 2016 in a number of sectors and subsectors including Agriculture, Construction, Electricity, and Manufacturing outperformed the 2019 performance of the Nana Addo government. To the surprise of many, Dr. Boako could not dispute his own government’s budget but simply claim the statistics in the budget as mentioned by Mr. Jinapor were incorrect.

In some parts of Dr. Bawumia’s speech, the graphs had totally different figures from what he mentioned in the paragraphs. This further deepened the already known facts about the cooking of data by the government.

When confronted with the Electricity Tariffs Recknoners for 2016 and 2019 which showed that Ghanaians now pay higher charges for electricity than they paid in 2016, Dr. Boako suddenly introduced “Electricity Inflation” as the new argument. As to how Electricity Inflation means lower tariffs to Ghanaian households, only Dr. Boako can tell.

At that stage of the discussion, the moderator ended the programme and viewers as well as social media commentators took to their pages to troll Dr. Boako who clearly failed to impress many viewers and listeners of today’s NewsFile.

By Ibrahim Yahaya, Baatsonaa, Accra.

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