BAWUMIAH HAS CAUGHT THE NPP PLAGUE

Any hope that the Running Mate to Nana Akufo Addo in the forth coming elections, Dr Mahamadu Bawumia, will bring fresh ideas to the NPP table became a mirage yesterday at the so-called Ferdinand Ayim Lectures when he delivered a speech under the theme “The true state of the economy”

Firstly, we believe that the appropriate theme for the occasion should have been “The true state of the economy from the perspective of the NPP”.

Be that as it may, we are bewildered by the Running Mate's chronicling of a litany of reforms he claimed took place under the Kufuor government which he says changed the fundamentals of the country's economy during their eight year tenure. According to him, as a result, the Kufuor government left behind a middle income economy to President Mills for which reason any attempt to analyse the first three years of each government will be an exercise in futility.

We can understand Bawumia's defence of the Kufuor government and the attempt to rubbish the achievements of the Mills government. Of course, Bawumiah must defend the Kufuor government because he was part and parcel of it as the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana and secondly because he is desperate to become Vice-President of Ghana.

However, Bawumia's dishonesty hits one in the face when the facts about the kind of economy Kufuor left for Mills is analyzed. Is it not true that the economy under Kufuor was so much in tatters by 2007 that according to Kwame Pianim, an economist and a leading member of the NPP, if the Kufuor government does not sell Ghana Telecom to raise the paltry sum of $130,000, the economy will collapse? Did this eventually not lead to the sale of 70 % of Ghana Telecom to Vodafone for at $900 million which is a paltry sum if one considers what the telephony company was worth? Is that the economy Bawumiah is proud of?

Obviously, Bawumiah, born into a CPP family and tutored by a father who eventually became NDC has sadly caught the NPP plague and learnt the ways of the elephants. He has thus started speaking like them. It is so sad to hear an intellectual like him speaking like the party's Deputy Communications Director, Sammy Awuku. His father must be turning in his grave.