Minority leader Haruna Iddrisu is concerned about the government’s decision to freeze public sector employment in 2023.

He fears this will compound the high youth unemployment situation in the country.

Expressing his grievances over the decision at a post-budget workshop at Ho in the Volta Region, Mr Iddrisu, charged the government to consider its impact on the youth of this country.

“Mr. Speaker, Ghana’s economy and as I listened to the Honourable Minister of Finance, the 2023 budget statement is replete with evidence that the government is simply ‘broke’ and the economy in crisis,” he said.

The concern follows the reading of the 2023 budget, dubbed the “Nkabom budget.”

Finance Minister, Ken Ofori- Atta, during the budget reading announced various policies aimed at “expenditure rationalisation” which included a freeze on hiring into the public and civil service effective January 2023.

Addressing the content of the budget, the Minority Leader, who doubles as the Tamale South MP, intimated that the budget was an indication of the highly distressed state of the country.

It is “an economy under life support that needs some resuscitation,” he stressed.

He contended that some of the interventions that the government is seeking to embark on, including the capping of enrolment of nursing and teacher trainees and the reduction of the size of convoys, would rather worsen the state of the economy.

The Majority Leader, Osei Kyei- Mensah-Bonsu, on the other hand,explained that the shocks and the depreciation of the cedi have been major contributing factors to the current economic hardships, which the 2023 Budget seeks to tackle.

“These (COVID-19 and Russian-Ukraine war) have created internal and external imbalances in the clearly economic woes; high inflation and unsustainable financing of the current economic deficit and rapid depreciation of the cedi. Suddenly, these variables have brought a lot of hardships to the citizenry, particularly the poor and vulnerable,” he noted.

He added that the budget intends to alleviate the plight of Ghanaians through increased spending on social protection.