The Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party government systematically worked to undermine the Pan-African Festival (PANAFEST) for the simple fact that the festival was initiated by the Jerry Rawlings administration, the Deputy Tourism Minister has charged.
Mr James Agyenim-Boateng contends that everything the NPP government did in the period between 2001 and 2008 was designed to annihilate the festival which brought together Africans in the Diaspora to celebrate �the strengths and resilience of African culture and achievements of Africans in spite of the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath.�
The Deputy Tourism Minister was speaking on the political talk show, Majority Caucus on MultiTV Thursday evening.
�You notice that PANAFEST itself was the creation of the NDC which was inspired by Afua Sutherland� and that was a major, major, major, platform for the promotion and marketing of Ghana. We were receiving as many tourists at every one point in time as far as our tourism calendar was concerned,� he said.
But under the NPP, he believes, little or no attention at all was paid to the festival, �therefore making the interest and enthusiasm in PANAFEST wane.�
In furtherance of the NPP�s agenda to truncate the PANAFEST celebration, Mr Agyenim-Boateng said, the Kufuor administration put in place deliberate policies to dissolve the national carrier, Ghana Airways, which he said, �was one of the major pivots around which PANAFEST flew and became as epoch as it was.�
Ghana Airways, according to him, was making special arrangements to ferry tourists wanting to participate in the PANAFEST celebrations into the country and back at competitive prices � prices at which other airlines will not do the same job.
�Today as we speak we were going to have a very large delegation coming in from the Caribbean but you do know that we do not have a direct flight from here to the Caribbean. Our original plan was for them to do a charter service [but] in the last week or two all the major airlines have upped their airfares; it also naturally implies that charter services will go up [and] that is likely to affect the size of delegation that we are likely to receive,� he asserted.
Having succeeded in crippling Ghana Airways, the NPP government, the Deputy Minister noted, attempted to introduce �a supposed Joseph Project. That was all part of the efforts to kill PANAFEST because it was an NDC initiative.�
The current NDC government, according to him, is working very hard to revamp the celebrations.
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