A lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School has given Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia low marks for his April 7 State of the Economy Address.
According to Dr. Kobby Mensah, Bawumia lacked confidence in his own lecture and in so doing failed to display some of his usual tactics when delivering addresses of this kind.
Dr. Mensah noted particularly the absence of direct jabs at critics, slotrademark laughter of the Veep as signs that ‘he is no longer in his comfort zone.’
“Bawumia has been less confident in his own lecture since he began. He’s no longer in his comfort zone. No jabs, no slogans, no belly laugh, more glitches, moments of dysgraphia, pensive and jittery audience, not to talk about selective evidence,” the academic tweeted minutes after the over two-hour lecture ended.
In his address, Bawumia made an admission that the economy was facing headwinds before going on to explain the main causes – which he said were the impact of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war.
He also mounted a defence of the government’s intervention in seeking to reboot the economy and ease current hardships.
He pointed at interventions which among others included the scrapping of 18 taxes since the New Patriotic Party, NPP, came into office. He insisted that the party’s record was ahead of that of the erstwhile NDC government.
On the subject of the Electronic Transfer Levy (E-Levy), recently assented to by the President, Bawumia only mentioned it in passing as one of the interventions the government was employed to cure the economic malaise.
Despite being a topical issue since November 2021 when it was introduced in the 2022 budget, the Vice President – who is head of the government’s Economic Management Team – has yet to make a definitive pronouncement on the tax measure.
