The New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament (MP) for Kwadaso Constituency, who is also the ranking member of the Food, Agriculture and Cocoa Affairs Committee, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, says President John Mahama has lost touch with the needs of Ghanaians.
President Mahama is living in the Stone Age and has completely lost touch with the contemporary needs of Ghanaians for describing the campaign messages of the NPP’s flagbearer as old-fashioned and needless, he indicated.
It would be recalled that President Mahama, in a recent interview with Metro TV, said that the ‘one district, one factory’ and ‘one village, one dam’ policies of the presidential candidate of the NPP, Nana Akufo-Addo are old-fashioned campaign messages used during Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s era when his father was then a minister.
The president said Nana Akufo-Addo’s ‘one district, one factory’ policy is just too broad without specifics while his ‘one village, one dam’ policy is already being implemented by the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) under his leadership.
The NPP lawmaker, in an interview with DAILY GUIDE on the issue, said if indeed the president made those pronouncements on the campaign message of Nana Akufo-Addo, then he (president) does not understand the concept of decentralisation.
Decentralisation is taking resources from the centre and investing them in the districts and towns which will help promote development in the rural areas and those policies being espoused by Nana Akufo-Addo are exactly geared towards investing in the districts and providing jobs to the teeming unemployed youth in the rural areas, he indicated.
The president refused to speak to SADA when he toured the three Northern regions recently but has started speaking to it in the comfort of his office. This means he now accepts the fact that he has failed his own people in the North for whom SADA was established to bring development to.
He said SADA, which has noble objectives for the people in the North, was mismanaged by his own surrogates, adding that the money wasted on the guinea fowl project and tree planting could have been used to provide water for farming and other agricultural purposes.
“As much as GH¢50 million was wasted on guinea fowl and tree planting projects and that money could have provided half of the villages in the north with water for farming and for other purposes,” Dr Afriyie Akoto said.
According to him, President Mahama, who is bereft of any laudable policy, has resorted to personalization of issues.
“I must tell President Mahama that no matter what they say about Nana Akufo-Addo, he is very much focused on his campaign messages which will bring hope and relief to the ordinary Ghanaian,” he said, adding that the $1 million fund for each district is another aspect of Akufo-Addo’s plan to speed up development at the district level.
He added that the NPP would enumerate more policies in its manifesto that would be launched soon.
By Thomas Fosu Jnr
