The man credited for helping President John Mahama to put together highlights of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) manifesto on Tuesday, could not quantify the various promises made by the president.
The Director of Research of the NDC, Dr. William Ahadzie, who was on BBC ‘Focus on Africa,’ Wednesday, appeared to fumble when he was asked to put figures to the promises.
Dr. Ahadzie, former National Identification Authority (NIA) head, could not answer a single question put to him by Akwasi Sarpong on how much the NDC was going to spend on the implementation of all the promises made by the president, except to challenge the claim by Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, vice presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), regarding Ghana’s debt stock.
He said the debt stock stood at $23 billion instead of the NPP bigwig’s $39 billion he mentioned at his public lecture last week.
According to Dr. Ahadzie, details of the manifesto would be released at its official launch in Sunyani, the Brong-Ahafo Regional capital, and even that he was not certain that the costs tied to some of the projects would be released.
He told the BBC that some of the proposed projects would be executed through Public Private Partnership (PPP) arrangements and therefore, could not tell how much they might cost.
In fact, throughout the short telephone interview, Dr. Ahadzie kept saying he did not have the figures at hand anytime the issue of cost came up.
Yesterday on Joy FM, Dr. Ahadzie said the ruling NDC had achieved ‘80 percent’ of policies contained in its 2012 manifesto.
He said in spite of the setbacks the party suffered within its first year, “the NDC government has done a lot out of what we have put down there in the 2012 manifesto.”
He claimed that the eight-month long election petition which the NPP instituted to challenge the election of President Mahama at the Supreme Court was one of the many challenges that prevented the NDC government from achieving all its manifesto objectives.
By William Yaw Owusu