Stop the complacency and honour your promises

Our country Ghana shall be a happy place if NPP is able to deliver all 2016 promises which are overdue. We have 2020 promises to contend with. But for now, the priority is to get 2016 promises out of the way.

We are literally in the sixth month of New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) second term with three and a half more years to go in the service of our country. One evil has already reared its ugly head as some factions within NPP have already started thinking about the one who shall take over from our President, His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo who is in his final term, as Ghana’s president.

Instead of rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty to do the job for which they won the general elections, a faction has sprung up from within the NPP, known as Movement For Bawumiah (MFB) that has started campaigning for the installation of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumiah as the flagbearer, without contest or unopposed, to take over from Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo as flagbearer who would represent NPP at 2024 general elections.

For the faction, the implication is that there may be no need to contest the flagbearer’s position within the NPP. And the cheek of it, they have broken every rule in NPP’s own rule book and started to select their flag bearer for 7^th December,2024 general elections. They are now flying without wings in absolute defiance of physical limitations.

Other factions within the NPP are highly likely to spring up to challenge the MFB by putting their hats in the ring to contest for the flagbearers’ position. Briefly, one could easily foresee internal wars within the NPP. Recently, Ms. Theresa Addison, a presidential staffer had to apologise for having declared Dr. Bawumiah as the next President. Others are playing the tribal card by suggesting that a southerner must give way to a northerner to be Ghana’s President. But our presidents have never been selected in accordance with their tribes or the regions they emanate from.

Below is a summary of our presidents spread across the regions they come from and is a very fair spread and it would be observed that we have had 2 (two) presidents from the northern regions of Ghana in our fourth republic. In other words, segregation or discrimination must not be invoked to distract us in selection of flagbearers or Presidential candidates:

• Northern Region - Dr. Hila Liman; Mr. John Dramani. Mahama (2)
• Central Region - Prof. Evans Atta Mills (1)
• Ashanti Region - Mr. John Agyekum Kufuor (1)
• Volta Region - Mr. John Jerry Rawlings (1)
• Eastern Region - Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo (1)

We have unfinished business with the NPP in that they have not completely delivered all their 2016 manifesto promises and it is the expectation of all reasonable Ghanaians that they deliver them. We are law-abiding citizens and would expect our government also to be equally law abiding. My candid view and indeed advise NPP is to desist from distractions and focus on the job of serving the people of Ghana. Their internal warfare must not come in the way for any reasons. They must therefore not spend time on 2024 general elections when we are in 2021.In other words, who has guaranteed us that we shall all be alive in 2024? Let us therefore think about serving the needs of the people one year after the other and refrain from running before we learn how to walk. Do not let us go into 2024 when we have not even gone through 2021.

We have extremely important issues to tackle head-on, e.g., Covid-19 for which we are expecting vaccines from the World Health Organisation. Then follows environmental health situation that is bizarre. We have not cleaned our open gutters for years and rather fill them with rubbish and other human waste, thus attracting millions of mosquitoes. These are some of the reasons malaria has come to stay with us indefinitely, in addition to the nightmare of Covid-19. The list of our priorities is numerous, and we all know that. Therefore, we need the Takoradi to Paga Railway Lines to be fully completed and up and running then economic activities shall spring up around every train station from Takoradi in the southern part of Ghana to Paga in the northern part of Ghana. Thousands of job opportunities shall be generated when the railways are in full operation, and we look forward to that.

The greatest benefit of the Takoradi to Paga train service is that heavy goods shall be transported from the southern to the northern Ghana quite easily and vice versa. Heavy-laden trucks that ply and damage our roads shall reduce extensively. To conclude this piece, I must advise our NPP folks to refrain from complacency and realise that we have given them 8 (eight) years on the trough to serve our nation with all their strength and with all their hearts and most importantly, to desist from ruling our nation oppressively.

Kit Yawson

London

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