Richard Ahiagbah, NPP Director of Communications
The leadership of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) has responded to claims by former President John Dramani Mahama that Ghana’s current leadership is based on “lack of experienced minds” to engineer the necessary economic rebound.
According to Mr Mahama, Ghana needs experienced minds, and not experiments, to bring her out of “the mess created by the Akufo-Addo-led government”.
Speaking during his campaign launch at the Cedi Auditorium at the University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ho, the former President said “with the mess the current government has left the country in, it is not the time for experiments and try and errors”.
Mr Mahama also claimed that the country needs an experienced mind, and he as a former president had seen it all and is the best-experienced mind the country has got.
But responding in a statement, the NPP Communications Director, Richard Ahiagbah, questioned Mr Mahama’s experience. “What is the Mahama experience, reselling H.E John Mahama…Ghana knows his dismal record; there is nothing new to add with an expensive campaign launch,” he stated.
Mahama’s experience
He indicated that Mr Mahama’s experience entails the mismanagement of the growing economy he inherited, and eventually having to seek an IMF support in a relatively stable global environment.
“Ghana, under NDC and Mahama, vanquished the unprecedented growth potential owing to the oil find. Mahama’s experience was tried, tested, and disapproved. The former President did not offer any new economic ideas because he had none. Mahama campaign launch speech is, at best, a plagiarised motivational speech, vision light and massive on blame that makes one wonders if he has heard about COVID-19 and Russia-Ukraine.
“The former president is arrogating people’s ideas without credit to them. I first heard Kofi Asare, the Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, talk about allowing the selection of SHS to be made after BECE results are released. Former President Mahama used Kofi Asare’s idea without reference to him. That is plagiarism, plain and simple,” Mr Ahiagbah added.
Based on this, he argued that “there are no new ideas there or visions, there is no hope there, and there is, undoubtedly, no experience there to write home about”.
“Former President Mahama talks about experience. Honestly, it will not help him to keep talking about the experience because the experience we remember or associate with JM are those of incompetent management of the economy and the power sector, which destroyed businesses, jobs, and the hope of a young oil-producing economy at the time,” he said.
Nothing new
The NPP Communications Director stressed that Ghanaians concluded in 2016 that former President Mahama had nothing new to offer, arguing that “true to form, nothing new was said in his campaign launch speech”.
He commended the Akufo-Addo government for its leadership in good governance and economic progress on the African continent.
He said the government of the NPP, led by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia “is providing real leadership in making tough decisions as Ghana navigates its way forward”.
Mr Ahiagbah maintained that the government is providing valuable leadership for Ghana at an incredibly difficult time, “not only for this country but all of us”.
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