NDC is Ghana's No.1 Enemy of Progress -NPP Youth

As the nation continues to battle towards finding a panacea to her developmental constraints, a group of young political activists in the Ahafo Ano North District of Ashanti have condemned the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) as being the enemy of the nation's progress.

The young politicians, who claimed allegiance to the youth wing of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the district, say the developmental aspirations of the nation would continue to be in vain if the officials of the NDC continued with their current behavior and the failure of the government to quench what was described as the political fire of the NDC.

Leading the group to voice out its opinion, Mr. Michael Konto, a resident of Tepa, the district capital, told The Chronicle that since Ghanaians voted the NDC out of office in December 2000, after the good people of the land had realized the misrule of the party, officials in the umbrella fraternity had made a vow not to cooperate with the NPP to move this nation forward.

Mr. Konto accused the officials of the NDC of persistently trying to raise political tension in the country by resorting to false allegations against government officials and institutions, declaring them as being corrupt and doing things that were not in the interest of the nation.

He cited as an example of the recent accusations that the NDC leveled against the Electoral Commission of manipulating the voter registration and photo taking exercise aimed at ensuring an electoral victory for the NPP in the coming general elections.

The group further accused officials of making it a policy of their party to criticize virtually every policy of the NPP government, without even making a careful analysis to ascertain the relevance or otherwise of the policies.

In the opinion of the NPP youth group, given the current behavior of officials in the NDC, and as he put it, their clearly manifested lack of commitment to the nation's development, any effort to develop the country was going to be as difficult as looking for a needle in a haystack.

Chronicling some of the criticisms of the NDC officials, which in the opinion of the group, were unconstructive and anti-developmental, Konto touched on how the NDC nearly got all Ghanaians to believe that the Highly Indebted and Poor Country (HIPC) initiative that the government opted for when it assumed power in 2001, was the worst economic policy that this country had been subjected to since her independence in 1957.

He stressed that at the time, almost all Ghanaians knew nothing about what went with the HIPC initiative, adding that the confusion that the NDC created at the time, made some Ghanaians even think that the NPP government was going to sell the country because it could not cope with the economic situation at the time.

"This initiative that the NPP government was compelled to opt for, due to the misrule of the NDC and the consequent mess into which the nation's economy had been plunged, has now proven to all Ghanaians that it was chosen to save the country from virtual economic collapse.Look at the number of projects that have been funded with the benefits of the HIPC initiative. Visit every community in this country and you would see a project funded with HIPC benefits. These numerous projects, not withstanding, the NDC nation wreckers still have the guts to talk of HIPC as not being a good thing for this nation, oh my goodness!" the outspoken youth leader stated.

Konto pointed out that after the good works of the HIPC initiative had exposed the anti- development agenda of the NDC, officials of that party were not ashamed and were still giving new twist to issues relating to the completion point of the initiative.

Continuing with what the group perceived as unrealistic criticisms of the government by officials of the largest opposition party, the spokesperson for the group resurfaced how legislators of the NDC stood firm against the introduction of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) to the extent that they refused to be part of the constitutionally enshrined parliamentary deliberations on the passage of the NHIS Bill.

"Every well meaning citizen of this country knows that the Cash and Carry health policy that was introduced by the NDC was a killer policy aimed at catering for the health needs of the few rich people of this country.

Yet the NDC parliamentarians knowing very well that the NHIS was a better alternative to the killer policy refused to cooperate with the government to see to the birth of the human centered health policy," the young politician stressed.

In the opinion of the group, what was more painful was that while the NDC officials had resorted to unconstructive criticisms of virtually every policy of the government, they had not for even once, offered an alternative policy suggestion to clearly demonstrate the commitment of the party towards the nation's development.

"Today, we are told that there is going to be a 2.5 % health insurance levy on certain consumables. This is clearly a good policy that demands the support of every Ghanaian but once again, officials of the NDC are at their best doing everything possible to pollute the minds of the citizenry to reject the policy, but thank God they have always failed in their diabolical plans," Konto added.

The group leader emphasized that whether the health levy meant an increase in the rate of VAT or not, and whether the NPP opposed VAT or not was not the point of interest to the people of this country.However, what mattered most was the socio-economic relevance of the policy.

He advised that if the officials of the NDC wanted the people of Ghana to take them serious, then they should begin to be nationalistic in all their endeavors and desist from their current behavior of opposing every policy of the government without any alternative suggestions.

"The NDC's attitude of 'this is NPP policy so let's criticize it' must stop now, otherwise the party is digging its own grave and would soon get extinct as a political entity of this great nation of ours," he concluded.