Deputy Communications Director of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Ernest Owusu Bempah says the New Patriotic Party is unfazed by the decision of former President John Dramani Mahama to constest for President again.
He was hopeful that Ghanaians “will not choose a dead goat over a limping elephant,” in the upcoming general elections.
Mr. Bempah said the 2024 elections will be based on track record which Ghanaians can easily attest to the hardships and mess they went through under Mr. Mahama’s tenure and reject him on that score.
He said persons, especially young people with financial difficulties couldn’t go to school during Mahama’s administration but president Akufo-Addo’s government has made free SHS a reality and has so far catered for some five million students.
Reacting to Mahama’s decision to run for president in the 2024 elections, Mr Owusu Bempah told journalists that “we all know our political history, what has Mahama got to offer the people of Ghana? As Vice President, as a caretaker president and the sitting president, for six years, he ran the economy like a casino economy. His key legacy was dumsor which was a nightmare for every Ghanaian. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost.”
He said the Mahama administration was so bad at managing the economy that the “economy was on its knees when there was no global crisis”.
“We handed over an economy that had discovered oil in commercial quantity, GDP was about 14 percent when we were leaving power but when Mahama took over before 2012, GDP dropped to 3.5 percent, that tells how he ran the economy down. This is the economy that NDC left, with abysmal performance in all sectors,” Mr. Bempah further lamented the damage done by Mahama’s administration.
Mr. Bempah also intimated that the mess caused by John Mahama was so widespread that the suffering it brought was cross-sectoral.
“The ordinary barber, the hairdresser, the trotro driver suffered. We were not in a pandemic, yet this was the growth, it was terrible under NDC. In 2013 depreciation of the Cedi was 14.5 percent, in 2014 it was 31.3 percent depreciation. We are talking about the dead goat. Most of the Ghanaian industry collapsed under NDC regime, from PNDC to Mahama NDC, so I am daring them to come and tell us that it is not right.
“In the banking sector, the interest rate was about 35 to 40 percent under Mahama, high cost of borrowing, there was no crisis, and corruption was the order of the day. Mahama institutionalized corruption in this country, they made corruption part of our body politics, to the extent that the leader himself was part, such as Kanazoe fiasco, Airbus scandal, Isofotone. A company cited by Bloomberg and New York Times as one of the most corrupt companies in the world was awarded the $280 million contract to build the circle interchange.”
He therefore advised Ghanaians to be wise because “Mahama is coming for just four years” and “what will he do in four years that he couldn’t have done in his six years as president?”