Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has cautioned against the deliberate disinformation concerning the health of the economy that is fuelling panic withdrawals and capital flights.
This situation, he said, is what is worsening the country’s fiscal problems and not government’s actions.
He stated that some persons have taken to spreading falsehoods about the economy on social media in order to create a fiscal atmosphere that would serve their parochial interests better.
“But this is a time in which you have high levels of social media activity, you have high level of misinformation and actually you have people who are interested in disinformation, that is very different from misinformation where people put out information that is not correct, and I’ll cite you examples.
“This is the era where you have people going on social media recording voices literally scaring the market. So it’s not about the communication per se, it’s about what people are doing to deliberately juice our market in a particular way.
“You’ll notice that currently some people are on trial, have been arrested, because investigation showed how they fabricating stories on websites, then putting them on whatsapp platforms and pushing them through to scare the market,” he said on JoyNews’ PM Express Business Edition.
He noted that while preliminary efforts had been made including blocking their malicious websites, they had gone ahead to create new ones to further their agenda.
This he says demonstrates the deliberate attempt to create an environment of uncertainty that will cause investors and the international community from regaining confidence in Ghana’s fiscal space.
“These are matters of public record, and even when those websites were shutdown, they set it up on new domain platforms anew to pursue the same objective. Two people are on trial currently. So there’s a new dynamic in the marketplace which is a certain deliberate effort to disinform the public.”
Kojo Oppong Nkrumah advised that when people come across such alarmist messages, investors and the general public’s confidence in the economy should not waver as this government has time and time again proven it can revive the economy.
“But you’d also have to be careful how you respond, that that disinformation does not cause you to run ahead of yourself and start saying things that you haven’t reached a point of conclusion on. The ones you’ve reached a point of conclusion on, for example, no principal haircuts you’re able to say so and also make the point that this is the administration that has been working to protect people’s deposits.
“Let’s calms down, let’s have some confidence in this same market. And if we all choose to have confidence, we will not necessarily be pushing for more answers to be provided when we have not reached those points,” he said.
