NPP and NDC Economic Policies Are Poles Apart

It is counterproductive to the cultural practice of partisan politics to counsel that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo share the details of his Ghana Beyond Aid economic policy agenda with the faux-socialist leaders of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), knowing fully well that the Mahama Posse has been vehemently and vigorously opposing every progressive and poverty-alleviating policy initiative that has been implemented by its main ideological and political opponents. Which is why I find the call by renowned industrialist and businessman Mr. Kwame Pianim to be at best chimerical (See “Ghana Beyond Aid Will Fail Without Role of NDC – Pianim” RainbowRadioOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/12/20).

Besides, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress are not the proverbial “Birds of Same Feathers.” Rather, these two major political parties in Ghana are fierce competitors and virtual ideological enemies. There is also absolutely no evidence that the leaders of the New Patriotic Party believe in the same economic policy decisions and initiatives that are geared towards identical aims and purposes for the development of the country. For instance, the leaders of the Rawlings-fangled National Democratic Congress fiercely opposed the possibility and the very social significance of the John Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). And when the latter health-policy initiative was bequeathed the John Evans Atta-Mills and the John Dramani Mahama tandem regimes of the National Democratic Congress, this flagship New Patriotic Party social-intervention program was effective bankrupted.

But for the savvy decision by the Ghanaian electorate to opportunely return the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party to the noble seat of governance on the third try when it did in 2016, the NHIS would effectively have been consigned to the trashcan of history, because the leadership of the NDC had been far more interested in striking pocket-lining and payola-fraught deals with foreign-based “development partners” than it had been in upgrading the quality-of-life amenities and infrastructural facilities of the proverbial average Ghanaian citizen. The NDC has also been fiercely opposed to the visionary implementation of the fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative by President Akufo-Addo, largely based on its own administrative diffidence and gross incompetence; so what really makes Mr. Pianim, an upper-crust bona fide member of the neoliberal and market-oriented New Patriotic Party so quaintly arrive at the scandalous conclusion that fundamentally speaking, President Akufo-Addo believes in essentially the same socioeconomic policies as his predecessor, the now Candidate John Dramani Mahama?

Other than his quite predictable well-known passion for annoying Nana Akufo-Addo, it is not clear what the former Executive-Director of the Ghana Cocoa-Marketing Board (GCMB), also known as COCOBOD, hoped to achieve by calling for the collaborative forging and implementation of the Ghana Beyond Aid Initiative. You see, contrary to what Mr. Pianim would have Ghanaians believe, the Ghana Beyond Aid Policy Initiative stands a great chance of succeeding over the long haul, only if the Ghanaian electorate wisely and self-interestedly decides to retain the New Patriotic Party at the helm of our national affairs for as long as this progressive economic policy agenda is envisaged to be both feasible and fruitful. Nana Akufo-Addo cannot “collectively package” any of his progressive and economically uplifting policy initiatives, if the primary objectives of the leadership of the National Democratic Congress almost wholly revolve around the dust-throwing fiction of the chimerical Greenbook propaganda diary of political wishful thinking.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

June 12, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]