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02.06.2015 NPP

NPP Blasts Ayariga

By Daily Guide
NPP Blasts Ayariga
02.06.2015 LISTEN

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has rubbished claim by 2012 presidential candidate of the People's National Convention (PNC) to the effect that the NPP flagbearer, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, is corrupt, describing it as infantile.

Ayariga, whose coughing record during an IEA presidential debate earned him the nickname 'Ayari-cough,' in an attempt to win votes in the upcoming primaries of the PNC, sought to justify his continuous attacks on Nana Akufo-Addo with a host of allegations when he met PNC delegates in the Eastern Regional capital, Koforidua, recently.

Ayari-cough claimed Nana Addo did not mean well with his promise to provide 'free secondary education' when elected president during the 2012 electioneering campaign, claiming that Akufo-Addo's father, who was one-time ceremonial president of Ghana, had a similar policy in the three northern regions scrapped.

Ayariga also alleged that the NPP flagbearer did not only fail to prosecute suspects in the infamous MV Benjamin case, but that under his very watch, a bulk of documents on the case went missing – even though Akufo-Addo was not the Attorney General at the time.

JHS
But NPP Director of Communications, Nana Akomea, told DAILY GUIDE, 'When you look at the attacks against Nana Akufo-Addo, the falsity is so basic that you will expect that nobody in JHS today will make these claims,' in response to Ayariga's tantrums.

Defence
First was the issue about Ayariga's claim that Akufo-Addo's father, who was then ceremonial president, cancelled free education for the three northern regions. Akomea asked rhetorically, 'In what position could Nana Akufo-Addo's father do that?'

According to Nana Akomea, 'As a ceremonial president, he was not part of the government; he did not have the power to take any executive decision. The people who had the power to take executive decision were the Prime Minister and the Cabinet.'

He said the ceremonial president did not have any power to take a decision such as free education for our brothers and sisters in the north.

'In any case, if Nana Akufo-Addo's father had removed that policy, who (which government) then restored it?' he asked. According to the NPP Communications Director, 'that policy has been there since Nkrumah introduced it and it's still functioning today and every school boy should know this.'

Nana Akomea could not fathom Ayari-cough's allegation that the NPP flagbearer is corrupt because Akufo-Addo failed to prosecute those found wanting in the infamous MV Benjamin cocaine case. According to him, 'Every school boy knows that the MV Benjamin cocaine case happened in 2005. In 2005, Nana Akufo-Addo was not the Attorney General; he was the Minister for Foreign Affairs.'

Denial
'But, indeed, it is even false. Every school boy in Ghana knows that there were many prosecutions that came out of that MV Benjamin cocaine case. The famous Tagor and his collaborators were prosecuted arising out of the MV Benjamin cocaine case; eight other people were successfully prosecuted; the ship owner and two Chinese were jailed,' he insisted.

It therefore beats his imagination why somebody who is a presidential candidate does not know this basic fact 'when every school boy knows it.'

Asked why he thought Ayariga would come out to make such claims without the least provocation, the NPP Director of Communications said, 'Nobody knows what the motive is except it feeds into the claims by his own party people that his motive is to work for the NDC. What he is doing would lend credence to that allegation.'

'Here is a man who has said that he has three ambitions in life: one is to study abroad, the other is to marry a white woman and the other is to be President,' he mocked Hassan Ayariga.

'If you want to be president, you are not going to be president by attacking somebody who is not in government; the only way you can be president is by showing that you can offer alternatives to the government in office, not by showing that you have an alternative to somebody who is in opposition with you,' Nana Akomea added.

By Charles Takyi-Boadu

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