Politics

Ghana will not leave IMF but wants adjustments, says President-elect

Published

7 hours ago

December 18, 2024

John Dramani Mahama, the President-elect of Ghana, has stated that he would not back out of the $3 billion rescue plan the country has with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but he does want to examine the agreement in order to address unnecessary state expenditure and improve the energy sector.

In order to alleviate the cost-of-living issue in the West African country, Mahama, the former president who won the election on December 7 by a large majority, toldjournalists that he would also try to address inflation and currency devaluation.

Mahama had earlier stated that in 2023, he would renegotiate the IMF agreement that the departing President Nana Akufo’s administration had acquired.

“When I talk about renegotiation, I don’t mean we’re jettisoning the programme,” Mahama said.

“We’re bound by it but what we’re saying is within the programme, it should be possible to make some adjustments to suit reality.”
Ghana’s electoral commission declared Mahama, who was in office from 2012-16, winner of the presidential poll with 56.55% of the vote.

The nation coming from its greatest economic crisis in a generation, with turbulence in its crucial cocoa and gold sectors, is left to the president-elect of the world’s second-largest cocoa producer.

Inflation was cut in half and the economy resumed growing thanks to the IMF agreement, although Mahama stated that additional work was required to alleviate economic misery.

“The economic situation is dire … and I’m going to put my soul, physique and everything into it and focus on making lives better for Ghanaians,” said Mahama, whose National Democratic Congress party also won comfortably in a parliamentary vote held on Dec. 7.

He claimed that Ghana was “unpleasant for business” due to the “multiplicity of taxes” that were agreed upon as part of the IMF program.

“We also think that (the IMF) have not put enough pressure on the government to cut wasteful expenditures,” he said, adding a review would aim to reduce spending, including by the president’s office.

“If the president is asking us to tighten our belt, he must also tighten his,” he said.

Mahama said that talks will focus on “how to smoothen out the debt restructuring” currently in its last lap, and that the IMF has agreed to send an early team to undertake a periodical assessment.

To prevent prolonged power outages, he added, a new IMF agreement will also look for durable solutions to the energy issues.

“We’re going to face quite a critical situation in the energy sector. The electricity company of Ghana is the ‘sick man’ of the whole value chain and we need to quickly fix it,” Mahama said.

Related Topics:Featured Ghana IMF John Mahama

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Politics

Egyptian court upholds ex-presidential candidate Ahmed Tantawy’s sentence

Published

1 hour ago

December 18, 2024

Ifeoluwa Dada

Former presidential candidate, Ahmed Tantawy, and his campaign manager, Mohamed Abou El-Diar, were found guilty of faking election paperwork, and given a one-year jail term with labour by an Egyptian court, Tantawy’s legal team announced Tuesday.

Last year, Tantawy was the most well-known candidate to run against Abdel Fattah al-Sisi for a third term, winning 89.6% of the vote.

To avoid receiving the necessary number of public endorsements to be on the ballot, he halted his campaign before to the election, alleging harassment and arrests directed at hundreds of his family members and associates.

Egyptian authorities criticised Tantawy’s tactic of distributing unapproved copies of endorsement forms to garner popular support, but they denied any misconduct.

Egypt’s Misdemeanour Appeals Court upheld the May court ruling on Monday, which prohibits Tantawy from seeking public office for five years and mandates that he pay a fine of 20,000 Egyptian pounds ($395).

Tantawy’s defence team member and well-known human rights attorney Khaled Ali said in a Facebook post on Tuesday that the appeals procedure was riddled with anomalies.

Ali said lawyers struggled for months to confirm court dates, with hearings appearing absent from official schedules and case files missing from court registries.

The public prosecution was not immediately available to comment on the ruling or on Ali’s allegations over the process.

Politics

Court orders Uganda to compensate LRA war crimes victims

Published

1 hour ago

December 18, 2024

Ifeoluwa Dada

Uganda’s tribunal has ordered the government to pay up to 10 million Ugandan shillings ($2,740) to each victim of Lord’s Resistance Army commander, Thomas Kwoyelo, the first senior rebel leader to be convicted.

Kwoyelo, a mid-level LRA leader, was sentenced to 40 years in jail in October for war crimes like murder, rape, slavery, torture, and kidnapping.

Kwoyelo’s “indigent” status prevented him from compensating the victims, thus the court ordered the government to compensate.

Kwoyelo’s crimes were “a manifestation of failure on the part of the government that triggers a responsibility on the state to pay reparations to the victims,” the verdict added.

The court also ordered various financial compensation to Kwoyelo’s property destruction and theft victims.

From strongholds in northern Uganda, the LRA brutalised Ugandans under Joseph Kony for over 20 years while it fought the military to destroy the government.

The militants raped, abducted, cut off victims’ limbs and mouths, and bludgeoned them to death using crude implements.

Under military pressure, the LRA withdrew to lawless forests in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic in 2005 and perpetrated civilian atrocities.

Although assaults are rare, Kony and splintered groups are reported to dwell there.

Kwoyelo was taken by the Ugandan military in 2009 in the northeastern Congo, and his case made its way through Ugandan courts until he was found guilty in August.