The Minority in Parliament has criticised the government’s management of the cedi, saying that despite billions of dollars spent on foreign exchange interventions, the national currency remains weak.
Speaking to reporters on Friday (14 November), the day after the reading of the 2026 Budget, the former finance minister Mohammed Amin Adam said the market response to massive interventions shows that “currency strength cannot be purchased; it must be earned through sound economic fundamentals”.
“With the significant billions of dollars of interventions, we expected the rate to be at GHC8 to a dollar,” Dr Amin Adam said, accusing the government of relying on short-term market support rather than addressing structural economic challenges.
Current approach
He contrasted the current approach to managing the cedi with the practice under the immediate past New Patriotic Party government and the International Monetary Fund-guided programme, where forex interventions were tightly controlled.
“During the NPP administration, the IMF restricted the Bank of Ghana from intervening heavily in the forex market. The intervention budget was fixed at US$80 million per month, despite international reserves exceeding the IMF target.
“By the end of 2024, reserves stood at almost US$9 billion,” he said.
Dr Amin Adam added that the cedi’s recent gains were largely due to reserves inherited from the NPP administration, rather than new policy interventions by the John Mahama-led National Democratic Congress government.
He said the Bank of Ghana has injected roughly US$8 billion into the market since January, reducing the exchange rate from about GHC14 to the dollar in early January 2025 to nearly GHC11.
“Despite these burdensome interventions, the gains remain disappointingly modest and fundamentally unsustainable,” Adam said.
Source: asaaseradio.com
