President John Mahama has urged Ghanaians not to experiment with NPP presidential candidate Nana Akufo-Addo when they can continue with his tried and tested leadership.
At a rally in Abisem, near Sunyani, in the Brong Ahafo region, the President said he has already began an industrialisation agenda which his main opponent Akufo-Addo is promising to do.
With jobs and the economy taking center stage in the 2016 general elections, the main opposition NPP has promised to industrialise the country.
In one of his promises christened one-district, one factory, the NPP presidential candidate Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has vowed to cite factories across the country’s 216 districts.
But president John Mahama has laughed this off. “You have never built a factory before”, he said.
“A man who has built a factory and another who says he wants to build a factory, our elders say if a tattered man promises to give you clothes, examine him first”, he quoted a Twi proverb.
As a testament to what he described as his proven leadership, the NDC presidential candidate mentioned the factories and plants he has rebuilt in his four-year tenure.
President John Mahama mentioned Komenda Sugar factory, the Elmina Fish Processing plant in the Central region. The Kumasi shoe factory is now producing boots for the military, he said.
He said the Tema harbour is undergoing expansion that would make it the largest in West Africa.
Under the NPP, existing rails were sold off as scrap but his government is also building a railway line in Sekondi-Takoradi, he claimed even though the Kufuor government built 80 percent of the Accra-Tema rail line.
These factories and infrastructural projects were built by Ghana’s first president Dr. Kwame Nkrumah who on Independence Day vowed that “we are going to demonstrate to the world, to the other nations, young as we are, that we are prepared to lay our own foundation.”
But after his overthrow in February 1969, the massive infrastructure suffered deterioration and later collapsed.
According to the president, Kwame Nkrumah was severely opposed until all his industries collapsed. The collapse of the factories is responsible for the worrying levels of unemployment in Ghana, he said.
More than four decades since Nkrumah’s overthrow, President Mahama says his government is gradually reviving the vision of the Ghanaian leader who was named Africa’s man of the century.
The President noted that once again, like Nkrumah, his government is facing the opposition NPP, an off-shoot of the UGCC, the formal opposition party during Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership.
President Mahama said he is being lampooned for ballooning the public debt just as Nkrumah was criticised for his infrastructural projects, his comparisons continued.
He urged the people not to be swept away by his detractors who are “first class” when it comes to lies and deceit.
Mahama encouraged the people to support his vision by endorsing his re-election bid come December 7 general elections.
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