Obed: We have no permanent friends

The Life Patron of the Democratic Freedom Party (DFP), Dr .Obed Asamoah, has called on the people of the Volta Region to assess their interests and adopt a policy which they will follow to satisfy those interests instead of committing themselves to the permanent service of individuals, no matter the circumstances.

"We should have no permanent friends but permanent interests," he stressed.

Dr Obed Asamoah was delivering an inaugural address at the maiden inauguration of the Ho Polytechnic and the School of Hygiene chapters of the Tertiary Students Forum of the DFP in Ho at the weekend.

Dr Asamoah stressed the need for the youth of the party to work at changing the mindset of the people of the region else "I'm afraid that darkness will fall upon you".

He described the National Democratic Congress (NDC) as a party with dwindling fortunes, saying the past two elections had attested to the fact that the NDC was gradually but insidiously having diminishing returns and was stealthily moving towards death.

The NDC in the past two elections, he said, had been losing in three regions Ashanti, Eastern and Greater Accra adding that the percentage of the voter population in those regions constituted 76.6 per cent of the total voter population.

"The percentage of the regions they have been winning is 23.33. Then you want me to be coming round and be telling people to vote for the NDC," he asked.

Dr Asamoah said he was in politics to achieve success.

"I am in to win. If I think our position cannot make us win, then I have to make that truth plain," he said.

On the country's state of development after 50 years of independence, he said past governments had missed the right development strategies.

"We have been through eras where state enterprises were seen as the panacea for development. We have equally heard of the virtues of the state taking control of the commanding heights of the economy. We have toyed with the concepts of people's shops, price control and what have you. All these have obviously been the wrong recipes for development", he explained.

Those development recipes, he noted, had sometimes been accompanied with the sort of rhetoric that repelled, investment. He said a DFP government would recognise the private enterprise as the engine of growth and would give full meaning to the concept.

"However, we must see that private enterprises will not always enter fields which may be necessary for the growth of the economy but which may not guarantee quick returns or which may involve prohibitive capital outlay such as the energy sector. In such situations, the initiative will have to fall upon the state, but best management practices will have to be observed," he elaborated.

The Volta Regional Youth Organiser of the DFP, Mr Wisdom Dafeamekpor, said since the re-introduction of multi-party constitutional democracy into the country in 1992, the two parties that had ruled the country, NDC and New Patriotic Party (NPP), had deliberately sidelined the youth in the decision-making process instead of inviting them to contribute their technical and scientific knowledge in finding solutions to socio-economic problems of the country.

"That resulted in their inability to come to grips with the development needs of the people, especially the youth and the underprivileged. It has made the youth to become despondent and virtually lose hope for a better future," he stressed.

The DFP, he said, had been formed to provide the platform for the youth to influence the political direction of the country in a positive manner.

"A DFP-led government would create a platform for the youth to play a central role in all decisions. This would enable them to become self-sufficient, politically mature and financially independent so that they can take the mantle after the current politicians have retired," he said.