Economist, Professor Godfred Bokpin, says the government is in a hurry to harvest dividend that has not been declared.

He was reacting to the Finance Minister’s press briefing on Monday where Ken Ofori-Atta said the IMF programme had started yielding positive results and thus called on all Ghanaians to support the government in its mission to restore fiscal stability.

According to Mr. Ofori-Atta, the positive outcomes seen so far include decreases in the rate of inflation and treasury bills, improvements in foreign reserve and current account positions.

However, speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, Prof. Bokpin noted that while the update was a sound economic strategy to build investors’ confidence in the government’s fiscal consolidation programme, he warned that should the government fail to announce more realistic information, it may undermine the expected outcomes of the IMF programme.

“But my problem is more of the content. It appears the government is in a hurry to harvest dividend that hasn’t been declared, that is actually not on the ground. In as much as positive news really moderate uncertainty, relative to negative news of the same size, what you put out there must reflect reality; it must be driven by data.

“Because the idea is that unlike a couple of decades ago where government only had access to the data and they’ll interpret it the way they’ll want it, now the data is available. And so you telling investors that things are improving and all of that, they’re also looking at the hard data, they’re looking at the soft data, and if what you put out there doesn’t match with the data then you’ll actually be running into some form of inconsistency and it will lean towards lack of policy credibility,” he said.

Meanwhile, government has stressed the need for policy “adjustments and re-alignments, and the return to a path of steady economic growth”.

“Let us brace ourselves for the needed reforms, especially in expenditure control, non-arrears accumulation, revenue growth, ECG collections and Energy Sector reforms, in order to rebuild the walls of the republic with urgency,” Mr Ofori-Atta said.