President Akufo-Addo has promised to turn round the fortunes of Ghana and make it a great nation.
Addressing the Ghanaian community in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, he said, “We are determined to turn round the fortunes of Ghana. Ghana should not be a poor nation. We are not a poor nation.”
He refused the tag of poverty which has been placed on Ghana, saying “I refuse the description of Ghana as a poor country. We are a rich nation, and we will make sure that the wealth of the country is apparent in the lives of its people.”
Pledge
He has therefore stressed his commitment to fulfill the promises he made to Ghanaians ahead of the 2016 general election, which saw him being overwhelmingly voted for to become president.
Nana Akufo-Addo said he made them “to save the future of our country. I have said to the Ghanaian people that it is my intention that all these critical commitments are upheld.
“With correct and honest leadership, we can get to where all of us want to get to; I am confident of the path we are on.”
For him, the quest to return Ghana onto the path of progress and prosperity has begun with the revival of the Ghanaian economy.
He reiterated his pledge to assist the private sector – being the engine of growth – with the belief that the sector, when properly assisted, has the strength and the capacity to operate and create jobs.
“So our attitude has been that, ‘let us do whatever we can to strengthen the private sector in Ghana to work and create jobs, especially for our young people in Ghana,’” he stressed.
Initiatives
President Akufo-Addo noted that the tax cuts and incentives introduced to stimulate the growth of the private sector has resulted in $1 billion of revenue to help the private sector to grow its businesses and create jobs for the youth.
The president talked about his government’s decision to make secondary education free, pledging to fund the cost of public senior high schools for all those who qualify for entry from the 2017/2018 academic year onwards.
With the restoration of the National Health Insurance Scheme being a major campaign pledge, President Akufo-Addo indicated that his government had deemed it necessary to find the money to save the scheme from collapsing.
“The NHIS was collapsing because it owed so much to the providers, and a lot of the providers were insisting on ‘cash and carry.’ We don’t want to go back to ‘cash and carry.’ We have begun to claw back the arrears and begun now to pay the service providers. So in the months ahead of us, we are going to see the full recovery of the NHIS,” he assured.
Touching on the agricultural sector, President Akufo-Addo told the gathering that the ‘Planting for Food and Jobs’ programme which was launched in Goaso in the Brong-Ahafo Region a month ago, is the panacea to the twin-problem of the migration of youth to city centres in search of non-existent jobs, as well as the disgraceful spectacle of Ghana importing foodstuffs from neighbouring countries.
The programme, he said, would be anchored on the pillars that would transform Ghanaian agriculture – the provision of improved seeds, the supply of fertilizers and the provision of dedicated extension services.
He, therefore, gave the assurance that all the necessary measures had been put in place to guarantee the success of the programme and that fertilizer was readily available to the farmers at affordable price – the government having reduced the price by 50%.
Additionally, with a looming shortage of agricultural extension officers in the next two to three years, and largely as a result of the erstwhile National Democratic Congress (NDC) administration’s decision not to employ any of the 3,200 graduates from the country’s five colleges of agriculture between 2011 and 2015, President Akufo-Addo revealed that his government had, in the last three months, employed 1,200 of these graduates.
He further assured that “In 2018, we will employ 2,000 more extension officers, with the solemn pledge of employing more graduates from our colleges of agriculture in the subsequent years.”
Decisions
The president again restated his commitment to protect the public purse by “bringing back competitive tendering for all transactions in the public sector. Sole sourcing, with one or two people sitting in a room and agreeing on things, is over. We are not going to do that again in Ghana. We are going to make sure that the competitive basis for doing things is restored.”
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