Vice-President of IMANI-AFRICA, Bright Simons has proposed what could be the country’s antidote to its poor financial management and records.

Speaking at the 2022 Baah-Wiredu Memorial Lecture on Thursday, Mr. Simons bemoaned the lack of trust amongst the elements responsible for proper public financial management in the country.

For this reason, IMAN-Africa’s Vice-President believes a new trust framework is needed for the efficient financial management of the country’s purse.

“We need to have a new trust framework in Ghana where we genuinely accept and we want to fix the problem. I think right now there is a lot of defensiveness on the part of government, a lot of polarization of things that are obvious and plain and truthful. When you say them they say you are attacking government but those things have made it very difficult for us to get a handle on this,” he explained.

He stressed that for government to be able to manage the situation elements such as the Civil Society groups, the Accountant and Controller General’s Department, Public Accounts Committee, Bank of Ghana among others, the other elements must “work in sync very effectively”.

Mr. Simons also debunked the government's claim that the distressed economy is due to the Russia-Ukraine war.

He argued that there’s no justification for the government to blame the sorry state of the Ghanaian economy on the conflict in Ukraine because the country’s economy is not as exposed to the Russian economy as other countries.

“When we start to do the comparative analysis you cannot use some other factor that has had a uniform effect. I tried my best to give you factors that could have shown that Ghana has been affected more, and as you saw I struggled with the data. I went to jobs, I went to growth, I went to how many people were killed and none of it bears out that we were affected worse. So if you are the worse performing in terms of currency, you cannot complain and say it is because of some factor that has affected everybody uniformly. It is as simple as that,” Bright Simons said.