Budget "speech" could have lasted 5 hours - Osafo Maafo

Finance Minister Yaw Osafo Maafo, who had to break and sit down during his presentation of this year’s three-hour budget, says he did not even read about a third of the budget statement. At a post budget briefing, he told journalists that if he had decided to read the whole budget, “it would have taken over five hours to do so.”

There was drama in Parliament during the presentation of this year’s budget, the longest ever, when the Finance Minister, who looked worn out after reading for a long time went mute and had to be given lozenges to enable him to continue with the presentation. He told the journalists that they had wanted to apply to the Speaker to summarise the statement but did not disclose why they did not do that.

In response to a question, the Finance Minister flashed a voluminuous publication, which he said was the budget of Canada, inferring that it was not out of place for Ghana to have a voluminous budget as that was the norm. He however admitted that it would have been worthwhile to have a summarized version of the budget read in Parliament while a more comprehensive version is printed for the purposes of debate in Parliament and public record.