2nd Lady Samira Bawumia
Second Lady Samira Bawumia has said her husband, Vice-President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, has elevated the political discourse in the country from insults to issues-based.
She said Dr. Bawumia speaks with hard facts and those who cannot compete with him only resort to insults. She, however, added that would not deter him from helping Ghana to have a strong economy.
Speaking on Asempa FM’s flagship political show ‘Ekosii Sen’ in Accra yesterday, the Second Lady was asked how she feels anytime she hears her husband, a respected economist and banker of international repute, being lambasted by his political opponents, particularly members of the opposition NDC, who claim the Veep massages figures to make the NPP’s case look good.
She replied that “it is unfortunate that the Vice-President’s opponents resort to insults. If you have something good to say you won’t resort to insults.”
She said there are a lot of distortions from the camp of the NDC on the country’s borrowing practice and debt sustainability, adding “our borrowing is not even 100 per cent of what we came to meet. We should put it in context. The economy of today is not the same as the economy they left behind. We are borrowing sustainably.”
She asked the NDC to ‘relax’ and watch President Akufo-Addo and her husband to the job for Ghana, promising “we shall do Ghana proud.”
She said if the NDC members were better managers of the economy, they would not run to the IMF for credibility, adding “when we came into office we successfully came out of the IMF programme that the NDC took us to.”
The Second Lady said it was so bad that even donors were refusing to give the NDC government funds for the sake of Ghana because as she put it, “They were mismanaging everything.”
“If you look at debt to GDP, we are doing far better than what they did and we have almost doubled the size of the economy they left behind,” she pointed out.
She added that “we have moved from a total freeze on employment which was what they left us and today we can have 350,000 direct jobs.”
She talked about how the Free SHS policy of President Akufo-Addo had brought hope to many people and put over a million children in secondary schools.
“As we speak, senior secondary school enrolment has grown to close to one-and-a-half million and we could have missed this if Ghanaians did not bring the NPP to power.”
Double Track
She said that the NDC had been complaining about the double-track system that had been introduced as a stop-gap measure to contain the huge numbers as a result of the Free SHS programme and queried what could have been done if the NDC was the government implementing it.
She stated, “They have been complaining about double track but it is helping to put the children in schools. The NDC is telling us that double track is not a good thing and I always ask them whose child should stay at home for others to have education?”