Press spotlights performance of Ghana’s economy in Q2, others

APA– Accra The report that the Ghana Statistical Service has announced that Ghana’ s economy grew by 4.8 per cent, year-on-year, in the second quarter of this year largely due to the manufacturing and crop and cocoa sectors dominates the headlines of the Ghanaian press on Wednesday. The Ghanaian Times reports that Ghana’ s economy grew by 4.8 per cent, year-on-year,…

APA – Accra (Ghana) The report that the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has announced that Ghana’s economy grew by 4.8 per cent, year-on-year, in the second quarter of this year largely due to the manufacturing and crop and cocoa sectors dominates the headlines of the Ghanaian press on Wednesday.

The Ghanaian Times reports that Ghana’s economy grew by 4.8 per cent, year-on-year, in the second quarter of this year largely due to the manufacturing and crop and cocoa sectors, the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has announced.

The provisional real quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate including oil and gas shows an increase when compared to the 4. 2 per cent recorded in the same period last year.

Without oil and gas (Non-Oil GDP) the growth rate for the period is estimated to be 6.2 per cent when likened to the growth rate of 6.6 per cent recorded in the second quarter of 2021.

When seasonally adjusted, the real GDP increased by 1.1 per cent in the quarter under review, indicating a 0.2 percentage point increase from what was recorded in the first quarter of the year —January to March.

The Government Statistician, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim, announced the quarterly GDP figures for the second quarter at a press conference held in Accra yesterday.

He said mining and quarrying, information and communication, and education sub-sectors were also part of the main drivers of the GDP growth recorded in the quarter.

On GDP sectoral shares, he said, the services sector continued to be the largest sector of the Ghanaian economy in the second quarter of 2022 with a share of 45.8 per cent of GDP at basic prices while the GDP share of industry and agriculture were 32.1 per cent and 22.1 per cent respectively.

According to Prof. Annim, the services sector recorded the highest growth rate of 5. 2 per cent, followed by the agriculture sector, 4.6 per cent and the industry sector with a 4. 4 per cent growth rate.

The main sectors with more than 10 per cent expansion in the quarter are education: 13.2 per cent; health 12.7 and information and communication, 12.4 per cent.

The five sub-sectors which contracted in the quarter were professional, administrative and support services activities, -11.0 per cent; real estate, -5.7 per cent; water,-2.7; electricity, -2.2 per cent and forestry and logging, -0.2 per cent.

Prof. Annim said the GDP (including oil and gas estimate at constant 2013 prices for the quarter was GH¢41, 205.5 million compared to GH¢39, 304.6 million in the second quarter of 2021.

The newspaper says that the General Secretary of the Socialist Movement of Ghana (SMG), Mr Kwesi Pratt Jnr., has said that the country has failed to build upon the legacies of Dr Kwame Nkrumah.

This, he said, was expressed in the country’s failure to control its own natural resources which was the cardinal objective of the first President of Ghana.

Mr Kwesi Pratt disclosed this in an interview with the Ghanaian Times during a placard parade by members of the movement along the John Evans Atta-Mills Street in Accra yesterday to mark the celebration of the Founder’s Day as well as the birth of Dr Kwame Nkrumah.

Clad in red attires, the members lined up along the Atta-Mills Street starting from the Black Star Square to the Bank of Ghana (BoG) headquarters holding placards with inscriptions such as “Nkrumah is like the sun, he cannot be covered,” “Petty jealousy against Kwame Nkrumah,” “It is purely an attempt to rehabilitate JB Danquah” and “Kwame Nkrumah; the true militant.”

“We are still nowhere near controlling our resources and exploiting these resources for the benefit of our own people that was the cardinal objective of Dr Kwame Nkrumah,” Mr Pratt said.

He also bemoaned the inclusion of other members of the Big Six such as J. B. Danquah and Edward Akuffo-Addo in the celebration of the Founder’s Day as he was of the view that they had a different vision and ideology in contrast to Dr Kwame Nkrumah.

Additionally, Mr Pratt explained that the decision by the government to introduce a freedom walk at the Kwame Nkrumah Museum to feature personalities such as the late J.B. Danquah and Edward Akufo-Addo was “a deliberate attempt to denigrate the value of Dr Kwame Nkrumah.”

Mr Pratt, also lamented about the less recognition given to the celebration of the Republic Day which he said was the pinnacle of the country’s struggle to independence.

The movement, Mr Pratt said, would continue to lead the charge for a socialist ideology “until the people of Ghana are free from the yoke of colonialism and all that stages of imperialism.”

Thr Graphic reports that today is Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Day. It is a statutory public holiday observed in the country to mark the birthday of Ghana’s first President, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, who was born on September 21, 1909 at Nkroful, near Axim in the Nzema East Municipality in the Western Region of the then Gold Coast, now Ghana.

It would have marked the 113th birthday of Dr Nkrumah if he were alive today.

The date in the past was marked as Founder’s Day in memory of the man who led the country to independence, the first in the sub-region.

In recent times, however, since the President Akufo-Addo government took office, the day is observed as the first President’s birthday.

This is as a result of the New Public Holidays Act, 2018 passed by Parliament to amend the Public Holidays Act, 2001.

It replaced three public holidays, including September 21 and introduced two new holidays, January 7 and August 4, which are observed as Constitution Day and Founders’ Day respectively.

Born in an era where dates of births, marriages and deaths were not registered, Dr Nkrumah in his autobiography cast doubt on his date of birth.

As his birth is being commemorated today across the length and breadth of the republic, it is fit that a moment of retrospection and reflection is duly highlighted.

The newspaper says that a new oil refinery under construction in the Tema Industrial Enclave is expected to commence commercial operations in January next year.

An investment of the Sentuo Group of Companies, the $3-billion facility, with a capacity of 100,000 barrels per stream day (bpd), will be the largest refinery in the country.

It will boost local refining capacity by 60,000bpd, up from the previous 40,000bpd produced by the state-owned Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) prior to the decommissioning of its expanded plant, which got damaged in an explosion in 2017.

Furthermore, the new refinery will help the country cut its long-standing dependence on imported gasoline and diesel supplies and save the millions of dollars spent to import finished petroleum products.

According to consultants on the project, George Andoh and Albert Duncan, the first phase of the facility, construction of which began in June 2021, was expected to refine 40,000bpd into various petroleum products.

Construction work on the first phase is about 80 per cent complete.

Leading the Daily Graphic on a tour of the facility in Tema last Friday, the consultants said about two million tonnes of refined products would be produced when the plant was commissioned (test run) by December this year, ahead of operations.

The phase two, which is expected to increase production capacity by an additional 60,000bpd, would bring the plant’s total capacity to 100,000bpd and annual production increased to five million tonnes, in line with the country’s annual consumption demands, they said.

As of last year, Ghana’s annual domestic petroleum demand stood at 5.5 million tonnes, which meant heavy dependence on imports as a result of the inability of the state refinery to function at its optimum.