Former Adentan MP and Director of Communications for the New Patriotic Party(NPP), Yaw Buabeng Asamoa, has absolved President Akuffo-Addo and his government from all blames on the high cost of living in the country.
Speaking in an interview with the Accra based Joy FM Midday News, the president cannot be blamed or faulted for the high cost of living in the country but rather, it is the rise of prices of commodities we import abroad that is causing the hardship. He argued that, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, production outside have decreased causing the rise of prices of items which is also contributing to the surge in product prices on our market.
“The increasing cost of living is not just the government’s doing. We are restoring economic and social balance gradually. We are actually importing the cost of living from abroad due to the ravages of COVID on the international economy. We are a very import-dependent economy, most of the things that we use in this country are imported”.
“Prices for those things are rising because production is down and those things are expensive abroad…freight charges are very expensive, container charges have become very expensive. So all the things that we are dependent on and are importing are very very expensive or we are literally importing international price rise and inflation into our country. So it not just the government’s doing, it is part of the international realities of post-Covid recoveries”, he said.
Background
In a recent commissioning of an NPP constituency office complex at Juabeng in the Ashanti Region on December 18 last year, President Akuffo-Addo admitted that Ghanaians were going through difficult times and that the blame should not be put on him.
“I admit that Ghanaians are going through difficult times, some people are trying to say that it is my fault, but you know that is not the case. Yet, they will continue to say it”, he said.