President John Dramani Mahama has challenged the vice presidential candidate of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia to reveal the cost of the cedi redenomination exercise in 2007.
The president, who was speaking at a rally yesterday in the Ablekuma North constituency in Accra, said since Dr. Bawumia was a Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG) at the time the cedi redenomination exercise was carried out, he should tell Ghanaians how much it cost government to undertake the exercise.
“Do we remember the cedi redenomination under President Kufuor. During that time, someone (Bawumia) was the Deputy Bank of Ghana and up till now, even me as a President do not know the cost of the redenomination exercise.”
But it appears that the president is posing the question to a wrong person since Dr Bawumia was not totally in charge of the exercise.
Moreover, the current vice president, Paa Kwesi Amissah-Arthur, took over as Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG) from Dr Paul Acquah, who supervised the redenomination exercise.
Mr Amissah-Arthur also replaced the then GH¢50 notes with the current notes without telling anybody how much it cost government.
He also introduced new GH¢2 notes and also failed to disclose the total cost.
The president might have been jolted by the successful launch of the NPP’s manifesto and the opposition’s claims that he is incompetent.
President Mahama indicated that the main opposition party has no right to label him since it has failed to give full account of a simple redenomination exercise.
“Up to date, no Ghanaian knows the cost of the redenomination exercise and the same people come and say someone is incompetent. When you redenominated the cedi how much did it cost us? Simple things like these you cannot tell us and you have the nerve to come and talk about corruption. Look in the mirror and look at yourselves.
“Take the log out of your eye before you point at the mole in somebody’s eye. Only God doesn’t make mistakes. I am human, I am not God. I am not saying I have done so much but I have done what I can and if others say they have not noticed what I have done, God who is in heaven is my witness and he sees the good works NDC has done.”
The erstwhile Kufuor administration carried out a cedi redenomination exercise in 2007.
Government, at the time, said the purpose of the exercise was to address inflation and other economic challenges.