Ghana is seeking China to join its ongoing external debt restructuring efforts as it pushes for an IMF bailout this year.
China is leading creditor to Ghana and other African countries. For Ghana to secure an IMF deal this year, it would have to restructure its debt levels.
Ghana’s debt levels are unsustainable and has to be brought to a sustainable level to get IMF board approval for a bailout.
Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo on Friday urged Germany to “encourage” China, to support its debt restructuring efforts.
Akufo-Addo who was meeting visiting German Finance Minister, Christian Lindner in the capital, Accra said “Our main concern right now is the arrangements that we are in the process of concluding with the IMF… and the specific assistance that will be useful to us and help us fast-track the process.”
According to the Ghanaian president “Our target is that by the middle of March, we should be before the Board for the full agreement. We have already taken one important step forward in concluding a staff-level agreement with the IMF and we are now looking to go the full haul in concluding the agreement. We are hoping that it will be done by the middle of March.”
“One of the steps towards that has been the domestic debt exchange programme that we are on, which unfortunately, we have quite a lot of difficulties, but has now been virtually concluded,” he added.
Creditors committee
A creditors committee is being discussed which is to enable Ghana restore its economic growth and the West want China to join that committee sooner.
“We have good relations with China. We will like you to encourage China to participate in these programmes as quickly as possible…A very important consideration for us is the financial stability fund that has been promised us as one of the key outcomes of these negotiations and definitely once again, your voice in trying to bring that into being is something that we would appreciate very much,” President Akufo-Addo told Lindner.
The German finance minister agreed on the call and told a separate news conference that he “would like to call on all creditors to join the efforts as swiftly as possible.”
“And, to be frank, I remind China of its responsibilities as a very important bilateral creditor of Ghana,” he said.
Ghana is struggling with its worst economic crisis in a generation but it secured a staff-level agreement with the IMF in December last year for a $3 billion loan.
The approval of this deal is contingent on it restructuring its debt of 467.4 billion cedis ($39 billion).
Source: Africafeeds.com
