Tamale North MP Alhassan Suhuyini as lunged at Vice-President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia and his spokesperson Dr Gideon Boako for denying that the then-running mate to the then-presidential candidate of the then-opposition New Patriotic Party promised the people of Ghana in the lead-up to the 2016 elections that an Akufo-Addo government would not borrow.

In response to a denial statement issued on Monday, 17 June 2019 by Dr Boako in defence of the Vice-President, the opposition lawmaker issued a statement on his Facebook wall on Tuesday in which he said, among other things that: “My initial response was to chuckle and say our Vice-President is shamelessly dishonest, indeed, and is rapidly dishonouring the revered office of Vice-President.

“I’m surprised that the Vice-President will attempt to rescue his sinking image with a dishonourable denial of what is known by many and was one of the bases upon which they admired him and may have hoped that as Veep, he will be Ghana’s economic messiah, which for decades have remained vulnerable and unstable”.

Read Mr Alhassan’s full response to the Vice-President’s office:

RE: Alhassan Suhuyini Fabricated Bawumia’s Supposed Tweet on No Borrowing by NPP

My attention is drawn to a statement with the above headline signed by the spokesperson of the Vice-President, Dr Gideon Boako.

My initial response was to chuckle and say our Vice-President is shamelessly dishonest indeed and is rapidly dishonouring the revered office of Vice-President.

I’m surprised that the Vice-President will attempt to rescue his sinking image with a dishonourable denial of what is known by many and was one of the bases upon which they admired him and may have hoped that as Veep, he will be Ghana’s economic messiah, which for decades have remained vulnerable and unstable.

I wish to bring to his notice that his promise to harness Ghana’s rich resources for its development, based on his knowledge of Ghana’s worth as a former deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana without borrowing and his latest denials are not the only falsehoods the good people of Ghana associate with his name.

1. The people of Ghana still recall with embarrassment when in October 2016 at the trade fair he promised that if elected “after the first two years, no village or community will have a water or toilet problem”. In case he’s lost track of time, it’s been two (2) years, six months since his party was elected and he became Vice President of Ghana.

2. The people of Bunkurugu and all 274 constituencies in the country also still recall his unredeemable promise of “a new economic model that will make available to them from 2017, 40bn Old Cedis, an equivalent of 1million dollars every year without fail for their development”.

3. We also still recall his pledge in 2017 as Vice President to ensure every Ghanaian own a Bank Account in 2018. With his experience in banking, I thought he will know MTN is a Mobile Telecommunications Company and not a Bank and so he wouldn’t have used the explosion in the use of mobile money accounts, which by the way began before he was Vice President and is not even owned by every Ghanaian yet, to hide the shame his never-ending dishonesty continues to bring him and the respectable office of Vice President.

4. We again recall the falsehood he peddled this year when in paragraph 6 of his presentation, at the government lavish town hall meeting held at the college of surgeons, he made the claims that: “The economy ended in 2014 with a fiscal deficit of 11.9% before falling to 6.7% in 2015, but rose again to 9.3% in 2016”, which is contradicted on pages 21 and 22 of the government Public Debt Management Report presented to Parliament on 29th March 2019 as: 7.4 percent of GDP in 2014, improved to 4.9 percent of GDP in 2015, and ended in 2016 at 6.5 percent of GDP.

5. We have not also forgotten the falsehood peddled by him and media promoters in January 2017, when upon assuming office, they alarmingly suggested that Ghc 7bn was missing from the state coffers.

6. We will also not forget how in 2016, Imani Ghana in its “Imani Alert: Bawumia Speech: Separating Partisan Politics from Public Policy” exposed falsehoods he peddled including a claim that 66% of Ghana’s debt was accumulated by the NDC in the course of 3.5yrs. Nobody including Franklin Cudjoe’s Imani Ghana understood how the NDC could have borrowed $39m if the total debt stock stood at $26bn.

7. What should have also been beneath your stature was how it seems your outfit paid up online news portals to twist events as they happened on a program that was live on Joy News TV Channel on which I made reference to the very well-known dishonest promise. Mr Kweku Baako and other panellists including the host never did what your statement and sponsored publications attributed to them on the show. At best Mr Kweku Baako only lamely expressed his doubts about the validity of the tweet I referenced.

It is not delightful to say a whole Vice-President is shamelessly dishonest but since he made the argument that if it’s true it’s not slander and it’s not an insult, which was largely accepted, in defence of his repeated use of incompetence to describe the performance of a sitting president. One is left with little choice than to say he’s truly consistently been shamelessly dishonest and so his latest denial that he never said his government will harness our nation’s resources and will not need to borrow for development does not surprise anyone.

Signed:

Hon. Alhassan S Suhuyini

Tamale North, MP

(Appointments, Land and Forestry Committees of Parliament- Member)