Ghana-budget Ghana's new government to unveil maiden budget ACCRA, March 9 (AFP) - Ghana's new government, elected to power in January, was Friday due to present its first budget, which is widely expected to include harsh steps to curb galloping inflation and tackle a huge debt burden. Finance Minister Yaw Osafo-Maafo will present the budget for the January-December 2001 fiscal year in the wake of pronouncements by the new administration that years of economic mismanagement would now end. Ghana's new president President John Kufuor has said his predecessor Jerry Rawlings had left Ghana, once hailed as a model economy in west Africa, in a shambles. In his maiden speech he spoke of "mismanagement, mass unemployment, low wages, high cost of living, a rapidly depreciating currency, a colossal national debt, high dependency on foreign aid." Other problems included "declining educational and health opportunities, extensive corruption in public life, a cowed and demoralised private sector, hopelessness and despair." Kufuor's government last week raised petroleum prices by 64 percent to 1.71 dollars a gallon, claiming that the Rawlings government had subsidised them to a ridiculous level. Officials said the subsidies caused the government to lose a huge amount of money since last March. Kufuor has said that provisional figures indicated that the growth of real gross domestic product, which gives an indication of the performance of the economy, in the year 2000 was 3.7 percent -- far lower than the projected five percent target. He said the total debt stock was 41.1 trillion cedis at the end of December 2000, adding: "Out this amount 31.7 trillion, or 5.8 billion dollars, was external and 9.4 trillion cedis, or 1.7 billion US dollars, was domestic." The new president has promised to clean up governance and launch incentives to step up investment, especially from expatriate Ghanaians, who last year sent remittances worth around 300 million dollars. ben-ach/nb ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html You may also send subscription requests to [log in to unmask] if you have problems accessing the web interface and remember to write your full name and e-mail address. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------