Government is planning to establish what it terms Fiscal Stability and Financial Stability Council to enhance macro stability to strengthen the recently passed Public Financial Management Act.

Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, who made the disclosure yesterday, said “in this next quarter, we are going to be sending certain amendments for the Public Financial Management Act to increase transparency to fiscal management as well as accountability.”

He disclosed this during an interaction with German businesses under the theme: ‘Deepening economic ties between Ghana and the international community.’

“We think that the current law is a bit deficient in these two aspects,” he said.

“We want to enhance it in bringing elements of fiscal responsibility law.”

Reasons

The Fiscal Council, he explained, “is going to be like the Monetary Policy Committee for the Central Bank; we need an institution for the Ministry of Finance that monitors fiscal developments of the Ministry, state-owned enterprises and so on.”

“When we put this together, we will have a lot more transparency of what is actually happening, so that you don’t get surprises down the road.”

Touching on the Financial Stability Council, the Vice President, who happens to be a former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), said it would be the institution that would deal with the overall financial stability in the country.

For him, this would enable government to have a focused approach to transparency and accountability in the country.

“I think that it will bring a lot of discipline and macro-economic stability, he noted.

Dr Bawumia said government intends to enhance transparency in the area of procurement since “a lot of corruption has to do with procurement, about 99 percent is usually in the procurement area.”

“The Public Procurement Authority is also going to make sure, starting in June, that every procurement is also going to be uniquely on their system; so if you are bidding for a contract, you should be able to go to their system, the procurement for that particular contract should be there for you to click and know what stage of that process it is in.”

On his part, the German Ambassador to Ghana, Christoph Retzlaff, disclosed what his country wants to achieve with its G-20 initiative.

“As a new government of Ghana that is putting private business and private investment at the centre of their activities, what we want to achieve with our G-20 initiative is we want to bring more private business and more investment to Ghana to create jobs and to build infrastructure,” he said.

In line with this, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel is expected to hold a conference in June, this year with selected African heads of states, business leaders in the G-20 countries and NGOs to conclude and sign compacts.