The United States branch of the New Patriotic Party (NPP-USA) has been closely monitoring events in Ghana since the new out-of-control NDC government came to power in January this year, and it is saddened that one individual is placing into jeopardy Ghana’s global acclaim which another triumphant handover of power from one party to another helped to bring about. By now it should be a multi-partisan realization that Ghana would be a better place if former president Rawlings learned to keep his mouth closed unless he has something tangible to say.
The whole country has stood by and watched Rawlings cause unnecessary division by his words and deeds. May be he is a nice man; may be he really cares about Ghana and wants the best for our country but it is hard to tell by what he says and does as his speech and deeds portray a deeply egocentric person who wants everything in Ghana to revolve around him! The list of atrocious actions and statements is too long to enumerate here, but two conflicting statements Rawlings made recently to two different entities on different days clearly indicate that he either lies pathologically or he has a hard time articulating what he really wants to say.
Shortly before United States president Barack Obama visited Ghana, President Rawlings gave a BBC interview during which he proclaimed “we all sit here saying there was a 40,000 margin. There was no such thing. The government was seriously rejected. The Western powers knew it, warned Kufuor and his administration that time is up, don't try to mess around with the figures as others are doing. Kufuor's regime ignored it. The world knows it but it equally ignored it. It took Nigeria to send General Muktar down to Ghana to warn Kufuor. Don't mess around with what is going on in Ghana with the figures because it might blow up and if it blows up there might be the domino effect in West Africa so please just hand over and allow the correct figures and let's have some peace in this country.” Now he claims to the Ghanaian Democrat “by the way, we claim to be the ‘Gateway’ but don’t be surprised if Nigeria ends up as the destination, as they claim. It is important to keep in mind that it was partly Nigeria’s intervention under President Yar’Adua’s leadership that pulled the plug on Kuffuor and Nana Addo’s intended adventure; not the Western powers, some of whom urged on the NPP’s electoral fraud and theft in 2004. But for General Sarki Muktar (Yar‘Adua’s National Security Adviser)’s timely visit, we may very well be mourning and licking our wounds by now.” These clearly conflicting statements from one who has been in a leadership position, in our opinion, constitute a very disturbing pattern of behavior, and we urge the former president to desist from making wild statements without merit. It is especially curiously timely that President Rawlings elects to sing the Nigerian President’s praises considering that the oil deal with Nigeria appears to be facing some glitches.
President Rawlings is unfortunately not alone in this deceptive practice of feeding Ghanaians falsehoods. Since the deceiving, out-of-control NDC government came to power, it has invested more effort in telling Ghanaians that the NPP government did nothing in the last eight years. Majority Leader Bagbin is the choirmaster of this blame-it-on-NPP chorus. Yet when Finance Minister Dr. Duffuor needed to impress the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a loan, he could not stop boasting of the accomplishments in the last eight years. He stated that Ghana’s economy has grown from 3.2 in 2001 to 7.3 in 2008. Dr. Duffuor further acknowledged that our healthcare system boosted by the NHIS has raised Ghana’s Life Expectancy from 51 years in 2001 to 59 years in 2008.
The IMF’s own impression on Ghana is even more startling. As at 2001, Ghana’s ability to sustain her international debt obligation was so abysmal, it could not work with the new Kufuor administration on additional loan packages. Eight years later, Ghana’s loan sustainability has grown to surpass her peers to the extent that the new Mills administration has been able to receive $1.3 billion in loans within the last three weeks.
Again the list of fiction that president Rawlings and the deceiving NDC like to feed the Ghanaian people is such a far cry from the facts supported by actual numbers that the mere fact that they insist on portraying the past NPP government as having done nothing amounts to a case of inferiority complex, especially given their own abysmal performance now and in the past.
We the NPP do not want to engage the out-of-control NDC on performance records because there is simply no basis for comparison given that the difference in records of the NPP and that of the NDC is like day and night! The fact remains that the NDC breaks it, and we fix it. We are almost certain that NDC will break Ghana again in the next three years, and we, the NPP, will return to fix their mess. They may have fooled Ghanaians once, but never again would Ghanaians be fooled into entrusting our nation’s destiny to a group so deceptive, inept and destructive.
| Source: NPP-USA Public Relations Committee |
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