Nana Akufo-Addo’s one-dam-per-village promise smacks of a dream, presidential staffer Kojo Adu-Asare has said.

The three-time flag bearer of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) made the promise in Bolgatanga during his tour of the Upper East Region.

According to him, a future Akufo-Addo government will ensure that each farming village in the northern part of the country gets an irrigation dam as part of efforts to make agriculture flourish in the country and also make the northern zone Ghana’s food basket.

However, Mr Adu-Asare, during a debate with the NPP’s Communication Director, Nana Akomea on Class91.3FM’s Inside Politics programme on Monday, 29 August, told host Moro Awudu that: “Nobody is disputing the fact that one can dream. One can dream only to wake up in the next morning and find out that it is just a dream.”

“Thankfully the Ghanaian voter is becoming very sophisticated and also as the days go by, they [voters] become wide awake and they can decipher what looks like truth, what truth sounds like and so on and so forth.

“The reason why Nana Addo’s promises have assumed such dimensions … is because it is too far-fetched and almost makes reality impossible, other than that dreaming is fair,” Mr Adu-Asare said.

Explaining why he thought the 1-village-1-dam promise is “impossible”, the ex-legislator said: “ … Once you place it under any scrutiny and place it under any acid test, it withers away. You don’t find a strong basis on which such a programme can flourish, that’s what the issue is, other than that it is a fantastic idea … but it is the person, the courier of that information and the posturing and the kinds of things he puts out there [that] make it a bit difficult for somebody to believe that he is really serious about what he is saying.”