Last Sunday, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) presidential candidate, Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia, met the youth at Borteyman near Accra to shed more light on his bold solutions initiative with them.
In sharing his vision with them in a televised engagement, he asked the youth to make an informed choice at the polls on December 7. “It is a choice between the one who had his chance and blew it and the other one who is asking for a similar chance to deliver, which is me.
“The decision is yours to make; not to bring back what was discarded in the past, but to vote for your future. If your priority is, as I suspect, about how to build strongly on the economic recovery that is before us, then I will plead with you to vote for me, because of the vision and solutions that I have for you and the country and the leadership, discipline and determination that I possess to see them through.”
The man of destiny and vision added that, “from what I gathered in my interactions with you, I can summarise the priorities of the majority of you into three main categories: Education, Skills and Jobs.”
The engagement with the youth was an opportunity for the Vice President to engage in a conversation with the people, with the view to convince them to buy into his vision of possibilities that abound in our country.
While Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia preaches the ‘can do’ attitude that helps to unleash the potential of everybody, the Vice President’s opponents are preaching gloom and doom.
Indeed, these politicians led by John Mahama and his National Democratic Congress (NDC) and Alan Kyerematen and his Butterfly Movement have become prophets of doom claiming to have the magic wand to resolve Ghana’s challenges.
These elements have turned their back to the tenets of democracy when the verdict of the majority reigns, and are engaged with the Jean Mensa-led Electoral Commission, the election management body for perceived electoral irregularities. However, when given the opportunity to justify their claims, the NDC and its allies engage in very unconvincing arguments.
It appears to us that the NDC and the Butterfly Movement wish bad times for the country, maybe a kind of apocalypse.
We believe that election offers opportunity for people to demonstrate their preference for the candidates in the contest.
Without mincing words, we can state categorically that this year’s polls are about the future of the country, but not the challenges facing us as a nation.
Some of the political actors in this year’s contest can be described merely as jokers who till date have not been able to unveil one policy initiative to resolve the high inflation, the declining rate of the cedi and interest rates. One of the apostles of impossibilities, Alan Kyerematen, recently engaged in the biggest joke of the century by promising to peg the exchange rate of the cedi to the dollar at five cedis.
We all acknowledge the economic challenges facing the country, but we do not need utopian ideas to resolve our problems.
Today, we have more that 100 private and public universities in the country, and the sheer numbers will create imbalances in the job market.
And the solution to this challenge lies in the hands of a political party and indeed a presidential candidate who can unleash the agenda that gives opportunity to the youth. Certainly, the solutions do not lie in the undefined 24-hour economy, but a policy like the digitalisation policy of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia that opens the floodgate for jobs in all spheres of human endeavour.
John Mahama has nothing to offer Ghana. A former President who can claim that there is no link between economic development and the digital space needs some more critical examination.
He has consistently demonstrated his lack of appreciation of the challenges facing Ghana and what ought to be done to take us out of the woods. We are tired of the situation where John Mahama accepts the harm done to our economy by the global challenges but misses no opportunity to blame Ghana’s present predicament on mismanagement by President Akufo-Addo. John Mahama wants an opportunity for equalisation, but we can assure him that he will find none.
It is a tall order, because Ghanaians are tired of John Mahama’s alternative government of dumsor, disrespect and insults. The people of Ghana deserve better.