President John Dramani Mahama has mocked the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), saying they are free to steal his ideas as outlined in the manifesto of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Mr Mahama, while addressing chiefs and members of the Ga Traditional Council as well as NDC supporters at the Ga Mantse Palace in Kaneshie on Thursday September 15 as part of his preparations ahead of this year’s elections, said: “I was directly involved in writing the manifesto for the NDC and so I know everything that is in that manifesto because I participated.

People did not just write it and bring it to me; I participated in writing that manifesto, so when somebody says we have plagiarised their manifesto I don’t think he understands plagiarism.

Plagiarism is if you steal from a known document and put in another document. But there is no document known as NPP manifesto that we know about, so how can we have plagiarised from a document that does not exist. If that document exists, produce it today.”

His comment follows claims by the director of Communications of the NPP that he (Mr Mahama) stole the NPP’s ideas during the presentation of the highlights of the NDC’s manifesto on Tuesday.

Nana Akomea, at press conference on Wednesday September 14, said the NDC “steals our policies and cannot implement them. They even stole the title of our manifesto. So they have no deep attachment to the principles necessary to drive the promises they give. To them, politics is all about ways and means, nothing to do with actually making lives better.”

But in reaction, President Mahama said: “They [NPP] say they will produce it (manifesto) on October 18. That gives them enough time to copy as many things in our manifesto as possible. And so they are free, the ideas are there, we have the ideas.

We’ve been governing this country, we are running the programmes, we know where we’ve come from, we know where we are going. And so we have the ideas to make this country better and we will continue to do the work to move this country to a new pedestal and I’m certain we will win this election and that by 2021 when I leave office, we would have made Ghana one of the model countries in West Africa and Ghana will be the envy of our sub-region.”