This Government has given communities up and down the country value for their money, whether through the provision of roads, irrigation systems, water systems, school facilities, agric extension workers, ambulances, etc than John Mahama could ever dream possible.
This Government has facilitated the setting up, expansion and rehabilitation of more factories than any other government since Independence, including the revered Kwame Nkrumah. This is a fact supported by verifiable evidence.
Again, no other government since Independence has invested more in rebuilding and expanding the railway sector than this Government. This is a fact. The evidence is there.
Obviously, no other government has invested more in e-infrastructure to digitise Ghana than the Akufo-Addo administration. This is taxpayers money being used to enhance efficiency and also create more job opportunities for young Ghanaian entrepreneurs. Digitization is opening up the economy to a new, wide range of job opportunities than ever before.
The response of the NDC government under Mahama to the dumsor crisis was to go on a spree to impose on taxpayers billions of dollars worth of contracted excess take-or-pay power purchase agreements. Even as this Government perseveres to terminate some and renegotiate others, hundreds of millions of dollars (taxpayers’ money) are spent annually to pay for power we don’t use by this Government.
John Manama was pretty good at awarding contracts he had no clue how to pay for them! This Government has been good at settling the billions in arrears it inherited and still manages to go about the business of implementing its own flagship programmes.
This Government has managed to reduce the percentage of contracts that are either sole-sourced or done by restrictive tender and, by that, saving hundreds of millions every year through the PPA by reducing the costs of such contracts to the taxpayer. NDC, under Mahama, made ZERO savings in such situations. This is a fact.
It bothers me how NPP can allow the NDC to attack it on corruption when the NPP evidently does more for the people with taxpayers’ money than the NDC did under Mahama. Clearly, corruption is such an easy cane with which to whip a government whether it is supported by facts or propaganda.
Corruption effectively means resources meant for public expenditures are going into private pockets. Surely if a government is doing more than any previous one in spending public funds on the people and their communities and also getting more in return than the previous government, then why should that ruling party allow that opponent to confidently feel that corruption is rather the ruling party’s Achilles heel?
Last but by no means the least, Mahama built a district hospital for over $35 million. Akufo-Addo is building 101 district hospitals for less than $17 million.
As for civil society groups, their standard is understandably higher, and so must it be. But not the NDC!
Source: Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko
