Policy think tank IMANI Africa has taken it hard on the New Patriotic Party describing major decisions taken by the young Nana Akufo Addo administration as indicative of a government which is ill prepared to deliver on its promises to the country.
President of IMANI Africa Franklin Cudjoe made the sharp assertions at a public lecture held by the Christian Service University College in Kumasi, where he spoke on the topic; “Managing the expectations of the electorate and the delivering of electoral promises.”
Mr Franklin Cudjoe indicated that the president H. E. Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo Addo failed to prove his commitment to managing the scarce resources of the country by attempting to justify his appointment of a hundred and ten ministers within the first few months of his administration.
He noted,”I must emphasize that a hundred days in government is a little early to judge the performance of any government. however if there is ever the clearest indication of unpreparedness in executing the many promises the NPP made into their vagueness, it was clearly in the appointment of a hundred and ten ministers, the highest ever in the country’s history.”
Mr Cudjoe added that the president “failed the first step of pragmatism and efficiency of resource utilization in spite of the justification made for this ballooning number of ministers. “
“You should know by now that the office of government machinery will accommodate all these hundred and ten ministers and that office alone had been allocated almost 1.56 billion Ghana cedis and that is sixty percent of all allocations going to the Ministries of Water Resources, Works and Housing, Roads and Highways, Communication, Railway Development Aviation and Transport,” he added.
Addressing the audience on the flagship Free Senior High School program expected to be commenced in the 2017 – 2018 academic year; Franklin Cudjoe questioned why government has not been able to release a single green paper on the promise even though it had it in its manifesto as far back as eight years ago.
“Whether it was said in just or was meant to be serious, the recent remarks by the education minister that the introduction of the free SHS gave him sleepless nights underscore the lack of preparedness in rolling out the program. I bet none of you here has seen any green paper or published strategy for executing the free SHS project and this has been eight years of the promise.
Expressing difficulty with the wholesale implementation of the Free SHS program he noted that, “Some of us have questioned the rationale for making Free SHS available to everyone including those who can pay when we have been told that the goal is to help poor parents keep their children in school.”
Mr Cudjoe also described the one district one factory program as mere “sloganeering,” explaining that there was no difference between the coined phrase and the small scale district industrialization initiative which already existed and only needed funding to execute.
He also charged the president Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo Addo to come clear on his establishment of a centralized national identification system as according to IMANI, the promise lacked enough detail on how government planned to implement it and how much government was willing to spend on the project.
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