Go To Hell

…NPP Blasts NDC MPs

The Member of Parliament (MP) for Asokwa, Hon Maxwell Kofi Jumah has described the National Democratic Congress (NDC) MPs as hypocrites who should resign “for better people to come and represent their constituents.” He said it was unfortunate that the party's policy of hypocrisy made its members always “speak from both sides of their mouths”.

Hon. Jumah made these remarks at a press conference organised by members of the Majority in Parliament in Accra yesterday. The conference was organised in reaction to some issues raised by the Minority NDC MPs in their “True State of the Nation Address” press conference held in Accra on Valentine's Day.

Mr Jumah said although the NDC insisted on various radio talk shows that their press conference was not in response to the President's State of the Nation Address, a cursory glance at the sequence and content of their conference proved otherwise.

According to him, as events stood currently, NDC MPs should do “everybody a favour, including those who voted them into power, by resigning”. The Majority Chief Whip, Hon Osei Kyei-Mensah Bonsu condemned the NDC press conference, describing it as illegal.

“Article 67 of the national constitution empowers only the President of the Republic to deliver to Parliament and by extension, the state of the nation address.” He said a careful study of the issues raised indicated that the party's reasoning was “convoluted, contorted and weird”, and that the utterances should be treated with “the utmost contempt.

“There is only one President and no other presumptuous person can assume that role”, he pointed out. Hon. Kyei-Mensah Bonsu chronicled some policies and deeds of NDC and its predecessor, the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), and accused the members of sowing “the seeds of 'we and them' politics”.

Noting that NDC was making strenuous attempts at injecting tribalism into everything that happened in the country, he said a radio station at Keta, recently carried out an interview, reading tribal meanings into the ruling against Hon. Dan Abodakpi.

Hon. Abodakpi, MP for Keta, was two weeks ago, sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for causing financial loss to the state and defrauding by false pretences.

Hon. Kyei-Mensah Bonsu, who was obviously not happy about the tribal interpretation being given to every national issue, posed a series of rhetorical questions to the NDC MPs thus:

“When General Kotei was killed, was it in pursuit of a tribal agenda against Gas? When General Afrifa and General Acheampong were slaughtered, was it considered an anti-Ashanti crusade? When Brigadier Utuka was gunned down, did anybody say it was an anti-Ewe jihad? When Col. Roger Felli was shot dead, was it war against his tribe?” To him, it was most unfortunate that people were misled into invoking curses on others for perceived injustices.

“The nation as a collective whole must reject the infliction of ignorance and injection of ethnocentrisms into any national debate.

“That also provides an opportunity to condemn the bare-faced propaganda to the effect that the national deworming exercise being organised jointly by the Ghana Health Service and the Ghana Education Service, with funding and supplies from the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), aims at causing the death of children from the Volta Region. Such banality!” He said one former high ranking NDC MP from the Volta Region once declared in Parliament that the people of his region (Volta) would prefer the worst form of governance by NDC to the best form by NPP.

Nothing, he said, could be more ethnocentric than that. “This was a most unfortunate statement. The NPP does not want to believe that the MP had and has the support of the good people of the Volta Region. Notwithstanding this warped statement, government is committed to providing the Volta Region with its fair share of the national cake because the region is an integral part of the country called Ghana.

“This nation must not be allowed to slide into ethnic hatred and suspicions. We are all one people in one nation with a common destiny.” He disclosed that contrary to public perception, the majority members made all efforts to convince their colleagues from the Minority side to return to the House, all to no avail.

The majority Chief Whip stated that the minority members refused to pick their phone calls when they (majority members) tried resolving the issue amicably.