Former Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana National Petroleum Company (GNPC), Alex Mould has commended the Akufo-Addo-led government for their efforts and strategies used in fighting COVID-19 in the country.
According to him, government has done some good things through the introduction of stimulus packages and incentives in fighting the pandemic.
As part of efforts to deal with COVID-19 in the country, government announced some packages to cushion individuals and businesses from experiencing shocks of the pandemic. Among such relief packages are frontline health workers receiving 50% increase of their salaries as allowances as well as a three-month waiver on tax, an insurance package amounting to GHC350,000 for all health workers, absorption of water and electricity bills, relief package of GHC1 billion for households and businesses, GHC600m stimulus packages for SMEs and many among others.
Speaking on JoyNews, Alex Mould said although government has done well with these packages, the President was however late in implementing some strategies to the COVID-19 fight.
According to him, President Akufo-Addo delayed in closing the country’s borders early and also delayed in providing PPEs to frontline health workers.
“I think the government has done some good things in this COVID-19 but they delayed in doing it…One of the good practices is if you lockdown quickly, close borders quickly. That we failed into doing that quickly and I would say if we had done it one or two weeks before definitely we would have had better results,” he said.
However, he said government would have found it difficult to implement those strategies if there were no roadmaps to follow.
He says the outbreak in developed countries like Italy, China gave the Akufo-Addo-led government an idea on what to in handling the economy in the face of the crisis.
“The roadmap of how you handle the COVID-19 was written because we had countries like China, Italy, Spain, we had good practice and bad practice so we were able to sit back and actually decipher what was the good practice,” he said.
Source: abcnewsgh
