President John Mahama has made the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) standard bearer, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, his target in his re-election bid as he launches personal attack on him (Nana Addo).
The president reportedly told the people of Bimbilla in the Northern Region that Nana Akufo-Addo, his main contender in the forthcoming polls, is a very dangerous man who should not be handed over power.
However, in a swift rebuttal, Mustapha Hamid, spokesperson for Nana Akufo-Addo, said that the president is being driven by desperation into making such unsound and mendacious remarks wherever he goes with his campaign train.
Mustapha said that President Mahama is on an insulting-mode because his Montie FM boys are not available to continue the verbal attacks of his political opponents as he had directed them to do.
According to Nana Akufo Addo’s spokesperson, President Mahama had therefore, changed into a serial caller’s mode to fill the vacuum created by his Montie boys’ absence as they serve a jail term at Nsawam.
“President Mahama has however, remised the jail sentence so they can return to continue their assignment,” Mustapha inferred.
Mustapha said their incarceration had forced the president to take up the personal attacks on Nana Addo, which he believes the jailed host and panelists of Montie Fm would otherwise have done.
“Once they [Montie 3] are incarcerated, he [Mahama] is the one now leading the insult attack. He wants them out so they can come and take over from him so he can rest. They have said they were working on his behalf so now that they are not there, he had to take up the insults himself. That’s the reason he’s [pardoned them],” Mustapha Hamid said.
The spokesperson said the president’s singular action of freeing the Montie convicts is the most divisive decision ever taken by any leader in the recent past.
“It is the greatest irony in our political history today that it’s President Mahama who is talking and labeling someone as divisive. Currently in Ghana, the biggest of division inside the country is his singular irreverent act of letting loose people who have threatened to kill and rape our Supreme Court judges and who have been incarcerated and who for partisan reasons he has set free. That is a subject of huge division, not yesterday or the day before yesterday, now,” Mustapha Hamid told Citi Fm.
“Isn’t it ironic that the person who has created the biggest political division ever in our country’s history is the one who is pointing an accusing finger at somebody and saying that he’s a divisionist and a dictator?” He wondered.
In reaction to the president’s charge that Nana Addo has been sleeping that is why he is unable to appreciate the quality of roads in the Western Region, Mustapha said that “here is a president who claims that roads are his trump card but avoids traveling by road in the Northern Region because of the horrible and dangerous state of infrastructure in this part of the country.”
He continued, “You are flying helicopters because your roads are unmotorable and you don’t want us to talk about that; you want us to talk about what is happening in somebody’s party. How does what is happening in somebody’s party put bread on my table or make it possible for somebody from Bimbilla to take his food produce to Yendi to sell?”
President Mahama is hopping from one part of the Northern Region to another sometimes for distances not exceeding forty kilometers, by chopper to avoid the rather dangerous roads littering the region, Mustapha added.
President Mahama is quoted as saying that the “intolerant character” of Nana Addo as leader of the NPP is a clear testimony that he will be a ‘dictator’ who cannot stand criticism from his own party.
The president said this in Bimbilla in the Northern Region when addressing residents of the area in a rally as part of his four-day campaign tour of his home region.
Mustapha, who would not suffer fools gladly, has been active in the past weeks returning fire, always vociferously, to the largely acerbic language from the president.
With the president coming under more and more heat, Mustapha would definitely be in a fighting mode ready to respond with equally scathing remarks to a desperate president who inherited an economy growing at 14 percent but succeeded in driving it down to 3.3 percent, only to promise Ghanaians that he would move to 4 percent next year.
A DAILY GUIDE Report