Mills Accuse Kufuor Of Diverting Funds

Professor John Evans Atta Mills yesterday called on President John Agyekum Kufuor to halt with immediate effect the diversion from the GETfund, District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) and the Road Fund into the HIPC relief fund.

Addressing a press conference in Accra yesterday, Prof. Atta Mills believed that this diversion is responsible for about ?550bn arrears on the GETfund and five quarters on the DACF.

"The government has deliberately allowed the District Assemblies Common Fund, and other funds to fall in arrears of ?550bn and has instead diverted the resources into the HIPC Relief Fund, which is illegal and unconstitutional", the NDC 2004 presidential candidate charged.

Briefing the press on the "State of the Economy", he said NPP's incompetence shows in the education sector where the GETfund, set up by the NDC Government to resolve some of the problems associated with tertiary education, is currently in arrears to the tune of about ?550bn.

"Yet the fund was set up to address needs of students but has been misapplied in apparent substitution for the development budget of the Ministry of Education," he remarked.

He regretted that within just a few years in office, the NPP government had increased the debt stock of the country from ?41trillion to ?63 trillion, an increase of over 50% in two and a half years out of the country's 46 years of post-independence history.

Prof. Mills said though the NPP promised 100,000 jobs in its first year in office, the unemployment situation is precarious and after registering beggars and unemployed, giving them a false hope of jobs, the government had gone to sleep.

"Redundancies and retrenchments without any regard for training and retraining programmes for resettlement is the lot of the Ghanaian worker under the NPP Government", he said.

He urged the government to take steps to ensure a reduction in the inflation rate and the interest rate and reduce the myriad of taxes that are crippling the economy and the private sector in particular.

Prof. Mills further called on the NPP government to comply with the Constitution and the law by paying in full the amounts owing to DACF, the GETfund and the Road Fund, as well as pay contractors and suppliers. "When these are done, the problems associated with the payment of the 30% Senior Secondary School subsidies and teacher-trainee allowances will abate", he predicted.

Prof. Mills also called for a re-prioritisation of the HIPC Relief Fund and the "resources channelled into key social sector projects as the rehabilitation of the Tamale Regional Teaching Hospital and the ailing Korle Bu Teaching Hospital after the constitutional and statutory requirements of HIPC have been met".