The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has observed that it is President John Mahama and his National Democratic Congress (NDC) appointees who deserve a gold medal for insults and not the opposition.
At the NDC national campaign launch at the Cape Coast Stadium on Sunday, the president launched a blistering attack on the NPP, saying the party, under the leadership of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has won an “Olympic gold medal in insults.”
The party replied the president and his party in a statement issued in Accra and signed by the Director of Communications, Nana Akomea.
It posited that Mr. Mahama has a track-record for making unpresidential remarks which do not help in nation-building.
“President Mahama claimed last Sunday, 14th August, in Cape Coast that the NPP will win a medal for insults at the Olympics. For such an aspiring Olympic referee, it is a shame that President Mahama has not taken into account his own leadership in this competition of insults,” the statement underscored.
The NPP further recounted, “President Mahama at the last NDC congress in Kumasi before the Cape Coast campaign launch diagnosed the then general secretary of the CPP, Mr lvor Greenstreet, as suffering from ‘incurable myopia.’
“President Mahama had gone on to tell Ghanaians last year that he would not take criticisms from anyone who has never been president before, and that the only people he would take criticisms from are former presidents Rawlings and Kufuor,” he added.
“So the good people of Ghana, who elected President Mahama, cannot be fit to criticize him because they have never been president before. There can be no greater insult on Ghanaians. If anyone was looking for a gold medal for insults, this is it.”
Vote Buying Antics
The NPP also said that apart from the insults President Mahama heaps on Ghanaians, the Ghana Integrity initiative (GII) has accused him of vote buying and abuse of incumbency.
“This GII accusation has followed President Mahama’s open distribution of large quantities of outboard motors for fishing at an NDC campaign event last Monday, right at the start of his official campaign. So after all these years, President Mahama cannot distinguish between an official government occasion and a partisan political party campaign event and occasion.”
The NPP called on “all well-meaning Ghanaians to condemn this act of President Mahama at this stage of our democratic development.”
2012 Plunder
The release reminded Ghanaians that in the 2012 elections, President Mahama engaged in this same vote buying exercise, adding, “In pursuit of this, his government ran up a record and unprecedented deficit of $4.2 billion dollars (12%) in fiscal year 2012 – the highest in the history of the fourth republic.”
According to the NPP, “It is this reckless deficit in 2012 that caused the weak cedi to become by mid 2014 the worst depreciated currency in the whole wide world. It is that record deficit in 2012 that caused donors to suspend assistance to Ghana for fiscal years 2013 and 2014.”
The NPP added, “It is this reckless deficit that caused President Mahama in 2014 to run to the IMF for policy credibility. President Mahama seems to be starting on this same path of vote buying again, right at the start of his 2016 campaign.
“For a government that claims to have delivered so much development to the people of Ghana and whose ‘one-touch’ victory is assured, why this resort to abuse of incumbency and bribery of the electorate?” Or is it the case that President Mahama discovers charity when elections are due?”
The NPP charged, “Ghanaians must rise up and save our economy from further destruction by President Mahama by showing him and his government the red card on 7th December.”
By William Yaw Owusu