What at all does the National Democratic Congress (NDC) want from Ghanaians? That was a question posed by someone after following the unproductive series of propaganda against the elevation of the status of the Ghanacard and other ventures of calumny and attrition in recent times. The answer we can proffer to the question is: they want to take the shine off the government and for that matter, the New Patriotic Party (NPP). For every successful project credited to government, one of the NDC propaganda bullet points is knocked off especially, after their noisy campaign of “it cannot be. It is impossible, they are lying.”
Were it possible, they would have said that there is no railway resuscitation project ongoing in the country and the free SHS is not being implemented. That would have been too palpable and so they would rather concentrate on issues in their embryonic stages as they indeed did to the free SHS. When the subject was mooted, they described it as a hoax, an unfeasible venture and intended only to grab votes. Now that it is in full flight, all they can do is to identify shortcomings when they appear albeit temporarily, and blow it out of proportion.
Last week, the propaganda department of the party went overdrive with the new status of the Ghanacard. There were clear signs of deliberate and sustained campaign to reduce the E-Passport value of the Ghanacard to a matter of mendacity.
For every development which therefore cropped up regarding the subject, spanning the hint about the project when Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia delivered a lecture at Ashesi University to the engagement in Montreal, Canada to the tweets of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), they were ready with doses of propaganda to counter. The bottom line of their efforts is to present the Vice President’s talk about the Ghanacard becoming an electronic passport mendacious.
Their assigns have been active on both social and traditional media in a bid to throw spanners into the works of the electronic passport project.
When the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, during an interview, explained that the project belongs to the Vice President’s Office, and so he could not speak to it, there was a twist to it on social media. The reporter had managed the interview poorly to the extent that he even misreported the deputy minister and instantly; they were all over the place with the impression that even the Foreign Affairs Ministry was not in the know about the E-Passport project.
As for twisting the ICAO tweet regarding the authority of sovereign countries in determining whether or not to elevate their national ID cards to the status of electronic passports, it came in handy for the killjoys.
The NDC would rather prefer Ghana progresses under their administration than no other. Talk about corruption-laced limited development and NDC comes to mind.
Ghanacard will now be accepted for return-to-Ghana trips outside our borders. The success story of the digitisation project is unparalleled and the originator deserves plaudits.