The General Secretary of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Johnson Asiedu Nketiah says some ministers under the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government do not deserve to be paid with tax payers’ money.
The NDC scribe indicated that Information Minister, Mustapha Hamid, should be one of these ministers, as he wondered why Hamid would reignite an old and temporary defence agreement Ghana and US entered into in 1998.
“They [NPP government] don’t know the seriousness of what we are talking about. Why must you impose the salaries of such persons on the tax payers and calling them ministers?”, General Mosquito as he is affectionately called told Onua FM’s Yen Nsempa hosted by Bright Kwasi Asempa on Tuesday.
The government has said it intends to trigger a recall of Parliament to ratify the 1998 and the 2015 defence cooperation agreements the country signed with the US under different National Democratic Congress administrations.
This follows the Supreme Court ruling that ordered the agreement to host two detainees from Guantanamo Bay on behest of the US to be sent to Parliament for ratification. Due to the ruling, the government says the 1998 and 2015 agreements are unlawful.
The Information Minister is reported to have said that “We [government] intend to cure that defect by taking the 1998 and 2015 agreements to Parliament for Parliament to give us ratification so that we will continue to operate under these current arrangements that we have until we have completed the processes for triggering the 2018 arrangements”.
But reacting to the issue, Mr. Asiedu Nketiah who is a former MP for Wenchi West Constituency between 1993 and 2001 said “the 1998 agreement was a temporary agreement and not permanent” like the 2018 Ghana-US defence agreement.
“That agreement is dead and buried. It was a specific temporary agreement”, Mr. Asiedu Nketiah explained.
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