Don't Vote For Mahama . . . He Has Messed Up Economy � NPP

The Communication Director of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Akomea has appealed to Ghanaians to take not of Nana Akufo-Addo’s position that the National Democratic Congress government has no solutions to Ghana’s economic problems.

Speaking in an interview with The Chronicle, Nana Akomea contended that Nana Addo hit the nail right on the head about the NDC’s poor handling of the economy because all the economic indexes do not add up.

Speaking at the Congregation of the University of Professional Studies (UPSA) a couple of weeks ago, President Mahama touted the achievement of his government and said a strong foundation had been laid for the economic take off.

“Our quest to build the economy into a resilient one and to diversify it into an export driven one, our results shows that, we are on course. Considering the headwinds the world economy is facing, Ghana’s economy is showing significant signs of resilience,” President Mahama argued.

“The currency is stable, the fiscal deficit is dropping, inflation is slowing and due to the new public debt strategy, our debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has declined significantly,” he added.

President Mahama also told the students that: “Indeed the fastest growing sector of our economy today is the services sector, which overtook agriculture as the largest contributor to GDP in 2010,”

But Nana Akomea would not buy into this pointing out that the situation President Mahama came to meet has worsened terribly despite his assurances every year that the economy was going to turn around.

“Inflation was 10% in 2012 but today President Mahama has taken it to 18%, interest rate was 25% in 2008 but today it is 35%. Budget deficit was 6.6% in 2008; it improved to 4% in 2011.

In President Mahama’s first year in 2012, it rose to 12%, which has been the worst in the 4th republic, today it is 7.6%. The government targets 6.5% this year, but President Mahama is struggling to achieve the 2008 rate!

“Debt to GDP was 34% in 2008; President Mahama has taken it to 68% today, Manufacturing grew 15% in 2008; today it is growing 4%. Agriculture grew 7.4% in 2008. Today President Mahama has worsened it to 2.5%.

On corruption, President Mahama has failed to retrieve the Woyome payments -$35million, Waterville payments $40 million despite supreme court order 2 years ago; supervised SADA loss of $25; $32 million to Suba for no work done; GYEEDA loss of $100million, of which they claim to have retrieved only GH 50 million from RLG.

“Also there is no Action Plan to guide national action to provide employment. They turned NYEP into GYEEDA leading to loss of $100million which alone could have built three Komenda Sugar Factories.

“The NHIS is also in trouble. There have been no transfers to hospitals and health care providers in the last 6 months. Threats of withdrawal of services have started again from the pharmaceutical suppliers,” he said.

Nana Akomea contended that if the above statistics are the true reflection of what has happened on the ground, then Nana Addo was justified in stating that NDC lacked solutions to Ghana’s problem and must therefore give way to the NDC.

The NPP Director of Communications said the unprecedented hardship the NDC government has unleashed on Ghanaians has compelled the political parties in the Northern Region to start joint anti-hardship demonstrations.