Opinions of Monday, 24 June 2024
Columnist: Awudu Razak Jehoney
Growing up, we were made to believe that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) is the
party of the academics and that they possess all the relevant knowledge that
can transform this country.
We were fed with the distorted history of Ghana and how the predecessors of the NPP fraternity applied their knowledge toward the development of Ghana.
This fallacious and erroneous notion about the NPP was forced down our throats, engrained in our younger minds, and became nearly indelible.
During the 2012 and 2016 electoral campaigns, the then-presidential candidate
Nana Addo said that his party, the NPP, had the human resources to develop
Ghana. It was during this period that the infamous phrase “We have the men”
was churned out.
The question that skipped us as Ghanaians was: did they just have the men, or did they have the men with brains?
Almost eight years after winning the 2016 general elections with this slogan
among others, this country has witnessed the worst economic challenges since
1992.
For the first time ever, Ghana had to suspend servicing its external debts, implement the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme that has painfully hit and
affected the comfort of our senior citizens and pensioners and compelled the
former chief justice of the land to join other senior citizens to picket outside
the premises of the Ministry of Finance to express their disgust in the hope that the government would listen to their cries, but all fell on deaf ears.
Where are the men? The economy is in bad shape and the country’s debt is
hovering around GH¢650 billion, USD1 is GHC15, inflation is around 27%, unemployment is 15%, and the interest rate is 45%. Clearly, the NPP has men, but not men with the relevant brains to solve national problems.
When the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was in power and faced economic challenges, we all saw how they dealt with it; they assembled the
best brains at their disposal and turned things around after the National
Economic Forum.
The NDC has shown that having men is not enough, but having men with brains, skills, and knowledge is the most important thing. Despite the sloganeering, the obvious and inalienable truth is that the NPP has the men, while the NDC has the brains. Let no one deceive you. This is a fact, facts are sacred and immutable.
At the tail end of Former President Kufuor’s Presidency, the country was in
an economic mess to the extent that the only way workers could be paid their
salaries was by selling Ghana Telecommunication to Vodafone UK in 2007. This is how badly Former President Kufuor managed the economy, but the NPP used propaganda to deceive us into thinking that that administration was anything
good.
After coming into power in 2009, the NDC turned things around and achieved
single-digit inflation for 31 months, which is unprecedented. Clearly, the NDC
have the brains but they don't talk too much. The NPP has been struggling
since 2018 and the situation is only getting worse by the day, there is every
reason to believe that the NDC will turn the economy around within two years
when they come to power because they have brains.
When the NPP government under Former President Kufuor was hit with energy
crises, what was their response? The Kufuor government sent priests to the
Akosombo Dam to pray for divine intervention for the rains to fall; this is their way of solving our national problem.
Conversely, when the NDC government under former President Mahama was hit with a similar problem, they used their brains to acquire the AMERI and KARPOWER plants to solve the energy generation capacity that caused the crisis.
There is a difference between quality and quantity; the NDC has the former in
terms of human capital.