Government has rubbished claims by the Minority that it exhibited bad faith in attempting to use the country’s natural resources as collateral in securing a $19 billion loan facility from the Chinese government.
Vice president Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia revealed after a four-day visit to China that the loan will not be based on the traditional model of borrowing and aid but will be based on bargaining power of the country’s resource such as the 2.8 billion tonnes of iron ore deposits, 960 million metric tonnes of bauxite, 413 million metric tonnes of manganese among others.
This according to the Minority is a clear departure from the views held by the ruling government when it was in opposition in 2010 when the former NDC administration wanted to use the country’s oil revenue as collateral to secure some $3 billion loan from the Chinese government.
It thus accused the government of double standards and hypocrisy.
In his reaction, however, Monitoring and Evaluation Minister, Dr. Anthony Akoto Osei, described the Minority’s charge as misplaced, stressing that there is nothing hypocritical in the government’s deal with the Chinese.
Speaking to Starr News’ Ibrahim Alhassan, he said what is being done by the government is “sensible borrowing” contrary to what the NDC administration did when it was in power.
He said “sensible borrowing that one is commonsensical. You don’t go and borrow and come and ‘chop’ so that you cannot get returns to pay back. That is what we are talking about. We were borrowing essentially to repay debt. We need to borrow to do investments that have positive returns that will make sense for us.”
“So when we talk about borrowing it has to be sensible borrowing, not just borrowing because there is money there to borrow. You don’t borrow to go and rebrand. That is an example of nonsensical borrowing,” he added.
