The Chief Executive Officer of the Association of Ghana Industries, Seth Twum Akwaboah, says concerning the domestic debt exchange, stakeholders have no other choice than to sign onto it.

According to him, without the domestic debt exchange, the country would not be able to access the financial support being offered by the International Monetary Fund and this could lead to devastating consequences for the economy.

“We’ve reached a point where we don’t have a choice. So I think that it is generally believed and accepted that the IMF intervention is very critical for us at this stage and it’s also a conditionality by the IMF that for you to access its funds at this particular moment you have to look at your [debt levels] ….they did a debt sustainability analysis and obviously the signs were there that our debt level is no sustainable,” he said on JoyNews’ PM Express Business Edition.

He continued, “And the debt has both foreign and domestic components and they’re asking that you restructure the debts. So it looks like we don’t have a choice because if you don’t do the restructuring then you cannot access the IMF funds, and if the IMF’s intervention doesn’t come in it will have a dire consequence on the economy, macro level and micro level and all that. So I think at this particular moment, there’s absolutely no doubt about it; we need to go ahead and do it. How you do it is the critical thing.”

He said it was rather good to know that the government was nearing its 80% threshold with subscription currently around 70%.

“The good thing is that we’ve seen the key stakeholders in this, the banks, the insurance companies and some institutions cooperating with government and signing on to be part of it. So that is good, it means we’re making progress. And as you said we have about 70% so far…so let’s see what happens in the coming days,” he said.

The deadline for the government’s extended domestic debt exchange programme is tomorrow Friday, 10 February.