NPP will pray but we won't sit down doing nothing – Nana Akomea

The Communications Director of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) Nana Akomea has replied the party's critics who are asking 'why now' in respect of the NPP's interdenominational prayer session.

The NPP have faulted president Mills for what they call his constant resort to Christianity and prayer as a solution to the myriad of problems confronting the nation.

But Sunday the party held an interdenominational prayer session at the Essipong Stadium in Sekondi/Fakoradi to seek the face of God and usher the party into its 2012 campaign.

Critics say the NPP was exhibiting double standards.

But Nana Akomea rejected the criticisms, insisting that suggestions that the NPP has always been anti-Christ are puerile and misguided. “In 2000, our theme song was 'Awurade kasa' in 2008 we started our campaign with a prayer event in Kumasi,” he stated.

He told Joy FM's Super Morning Show the NPP's problem with President Mills' increasingly public religiosity is that, the president appears to do virtually nothing apart from the prayer.

What is the use of prayer without action?, he asked rhetorically.

According to him, the president cannot profess piety while at the same time preside over corrupt practices, citing the findings of investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas on cocoa smuggling, a case in which some suspects were freed because prosecutors consistently failed to appear in court, despite the president's public expression of outrage when the findings were made public.

He said if the government consistently failed to do things as basic as presenting already documented evidence of crimes before court, how can the president rely on prayers for solutions to Ghana's problems and expect to be taken seriously.

Nana Akomea rejected suggestions that the NPP has no coherent message for the 2012 elections, maintaining that when the largest opposition party launches its 2012 manifesto, “That manifesto is going to spell out…in very clear, simple, persuasive logical, terms, the alternatives for Ghana.”

The manifesto, he said, will give meaning to the NPP flagbearer, Nana Akufo-Addo's promise to make senior high school the termination point for basic education.

He said the current situation where thousands of young people drop out of school because they have not had the required passes to progress to senior high school is unacceptable as it consigns a larger majority of students to irretrievable doom.

An NPP government, Nana Akomea believes, will reverse the current stagnation, which is attested to by even the founder of the governing NDC, Jerry Rawlings, in national development.

He said it was curious that a government that has taken seven billion Dollars in loans and raked in $600 million in oil revenues had nothing to show in terms of concrete infrastructural development.

Nana Akomea catalogued the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty, the Free Maternal Care Programme as social intervention programmes which had been introduced by the NPP government and which had all dissipated, evaporated and been mismanaged by the Mills administration.

Story by Ghana l Malik Abass Daabu/Myjoyonline.com