Akomea to govt: NPP has a message

The Director of Communications for the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Akomea, has told the Minister of Communications, Dr Edward Omane Boamah that the NPP did not initiate the recent heated debate on corruption in Ghana but President John Mahama did.

Dr Omane Boamah had said that the NPP had no message for Ghanaians going into the November 7 polls, therefore, resorting to all manner of futile efforts, including attempts to smear the president as corrupt, in order to make him and his government unpopular.

But reacting Dr Omane Boamah’s on Asempa FM’s ‘Ekosii Sen’ political talk programme on Monday May 16, Nana Akomea recounted that it was President Mahama, who, in an interview with the BBC on the sidelines of an anti-corruption summit held in London last week, opened the discussion on corruption when he tried to articulate how his government was fighting the canker.

While in London, the president threw a challenge to Ghanaians to point out any minister of state who they think is corrupt for appropriate sanctions to be meted out to him or her.

But just as the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), an anti-graft body, expressed concerns about the president’s remarks and asked him to implement policies to fight corruption, the NPP also believed that there are numerous corrupt acts President Mahama and his government have engaged in.

“The president went abroad to speak about his efforts to fight corruption, the media picks it up and invite us to speak on it and when we express our views on such matters, Omane Boamah says we have no message,” Akomea said.

According to him, overpricing of government projects, sole-sourcing of huge government contracts and several other acts of corruption have characterised the Mahama government over the years, adding that these cases of graft have caused several persons such as the founder of the NDC, Jerry John Rawlings to expressed concerns about how corruption has become endemic in the government.