New Patriotic Party (NPP) standard bearer Nana
Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has promised a ‘new beginning’ as Ghanaians prepare to
elect a new president on December 7.
It is going to be a simple decision,
either to retain incumbent President John Mahama and his National Democratic
Congress (NDC) or change them; and ahead of the crucial exercise, the NPP leader
is highly optimistic that Ghanaians would choose him and his NPP to form the
next government and change the course of development for the better.“We
go to the polls to elect members of parliament and the president of the Republic
on December 7. I am honoured to be the presidential candidate for my party, the
NPP. We are presenting the country with a manifesto of fully costed programmes
that we term, ‘An Agenda for Jobs,’” Nana Akufo-Addo stated in Newsweek, an
international magazine, explaining in detail why change is coming to
Ghana.
Change For The Better
The article posted
on Friday at 4pm stated, “We are hoping to win the forthcoming elections and are
determined to do things differently to be able to give our country a solid and
sustainable change for the better.
“After 60 years, we have run out of
excuses for our poverty and slow rate of development. My party is committed to
the establishment of the office of a public prosecutor to reassure Ghanaians
that decisions about prosecutions are removed from political
considerations.”
According to the NPP leader, President Mahama’s
government “has mortgaged our future,” adding that the NDC government had
“borrowed heavily against our future to increase spending, but none of it has
strengthened our economy, our well-being, or our regional or global
standing.
“As attention to African markets expands, we find ourselves
competing with other nations we used to outrank. But the good news is that,
after eight years, the people of Ghana are looking for change.”
Nana
Akufo-Addo said, “How Ghana manages its oil wealth will determine how we are
viewed by the world. But more importantly, it will determine what our people
think of our nation. On December 7, Ghana has the opportunity to restore hope
and set the country on the path of prosperity.”
No Economic
Dividend
He said that Ghana is peaceful but under President
Mahama, “There are no economic dividends.”
He said youth unemployment had
reached alarming levels and that it is the greatest threat to the country
saying, “The government has been on a borrowing binge that, if not stopped, will
impoverish our nation and its people.
“Nobody would question borrowing to
invest, but the IMF’s managing director Christine Lagarde has said that Ghana’s
large borrowing was not generally used for investments, but was instead used to
finance large recurrent spending.”
No
Transparency
Nana Addo said the Mahama government has abandoned
“all transparency in procurement, and big national projects are contracted out
without any competitive bidding,” adding, “There are open accusations of
corruption in government that have not been properly addressed. The 2016 Mo
Ibrahim Index on African Governance cited Ghana as one of the two worst
deteriorations in governance in the last decade among African
countries.
“Ghana’s economic growth rate topped 14 percent in 2011, but
collapsed to under 4 percent in 2014, driven by a sharp contraction in the
industrial and service sectors. The Ghana currency went into freefall,
inflationary pressures rose and today bank base rates average about 33
percent.”
Wasted Opportunities
Nana Akufo-Addo
said the best way to describe Ghana’s economic situation currently “is one of
wasted opportunities. The IMF predicts that our GDP growth in 2016 will be 3.3
percent – the lowest since 1994. Our GDP growth this year will be the lowest it
has been since 1994.”
He said that national borrowing and spending were
so out of control that “lenders no longer consider us a good risk,” adding, “As
oil output increased, Ghana slid back into becoming a highly distressed indebted
country.”
He continued, “We are again dependent on payouts from the IMF,
and negotiating national policies and reforms with foreign institutions. Foreign
investors have been discouraged by the unstable economic conditions, and by the
electricity crisis that has left Ghana with shortages and
outages.”
Mahama’s Spending-Spree
The NPP flag
bearer noted that President Mahama, after succeeding the late President Mills,
went on a spending spree just to ensure that he continued in office; and it came
at a huge cost to the country.
“In order to retain the presidency in the
elections, President Mahama went on a dramatic four-month spending spree that
tipped the current account deficit into the double-digit zone. He managed a
disputed slim electoral victory but the consequences have stayed with us. My
party went to court to contest the election results and, as our presidential
candidate, I accepted the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in favour of the result and
we maintained the peace of our nation.”
NPP’s
Efforts
He said economic progress has stalled under NDC, in
spite of the massive oil discovery by the NPP. “By 2012, as we approached
elections, Ghana was having economic difficulties: real GDP growth dropped from
14 percent in 2011 to 8 percent in 2012, and the fiscal deficit increased from
-4 percent to -11.6 percent in the same period due to unbudgeted election-year
spending,” Nana Addo recalled.
He said the NPP government under President
J.A. Kufuor – under which he served as Attorney General and Minister of Justice
and later Foreign Minister – had inherited what he called “a desperate economic
situation” from the same NDC, but the ‘brave’ decisions the then government took
brought Ghana on the path of economic progress,” to the admiration of the
international community.
NDC Propaganda
“As
President Kufuor prepared to retire, the then opposition NDC rolled out a clever
query during the 2008 elections: ‘Where’s the money in your pockets?’ Their
campaign, fronted by then vice presidential candidate John Mahama, was based on
the premise that macroeconomic stability did not matter; infrastructure
development did not matter; the establishment of a National Health Insurance
Scheme did not matter; Ghana halving poverty did not matter; Ghana becoming one
of the first countries to meet the stringent conditions of the United States
Millennium Challenge Account and signing for a $500 million grant for
infrastructure development in 2006 did not matter,” Nana
averred. |
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