Kwesi Pratt Jnr. has hit hard at the erstwhile National Democratic Congress (NDC) government, claiming they did a "useless work".
Kwesi Pratt explained that one of the factors that led to the NDC's defeat in the 2016 elections was because the government failed to bring relief to Ghanaians in their budget statements.
According to him, the erstwhile Mahama administration was supposed to read a budget that would have a direct influence on the citizens but rather made a lot of "useless" interventions that didn't benefit the population.
Mr. Pratt was commenting on the 2017 budget statement by the ruling government dubbed the "Asempa" Budget which is translated as the "Good news budget". He noted that if the NDC had presented the budget statement by Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta to the nation; it perhaps would have remained in power.
To him, a budget is a "a political instrument that shows the direction of the government and this budget defined that thing clearly",
"Two of the best examples is so-called abolition of taxes on spare parts. The second one is the Kayayei thing. That is how the budget should be. I’m not saying it’s wrong. When you finish reading a budget, you have to see which sections of the society are going to benefit and which sections of the society are not going to benefit.”
“That’s what our brethren in the NDC didn’t do and so suffered. If you do Circle interchange, you this or that, you do a green book and if you don’t direct it at a certain constituency make people own the budget or aspects of the budget; in terms of politics, you’re doing a useless work. That’s why you did a lot of useless works and this is a very important point for me. All the work they did, in the final analysis, look at the election results. So, people did not own the work they did," Mr. Pratt stressed.