The Vice Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic party (NPP) flagbearer, Dr Mahamud Bawumia has yet again exposed his ignorance about the Ghanaian economy, this time, far away in the United States of America. This has compelled Deputy Minister of Finance & Economic Planning, Hon Fifi Kwetey, to react to the blatant falsehood and correct the wrong impression created about the country by NPP’s economics whiz kid in a foreign land.

Whiles addressing NPP supporters in the US on his recent trip to that country, Dr Bawumia had said that the NPP, upon winning power in December 2012, eliminate import duties on equipment into the country in order to boost technology acquisition to boost local industry. This he claimed would bring a paradigm shift into 21st century from the current 18th century. This, he claimed would thus boost local industry such as real estate, construction, manufacturing, education, ICT and health.

Speaking to The Catalyst in reaction to what he described as NPP’s catalogue of deceit and false promises again, Hon Fifi Kwetey expressed surprise that Dr Bawumiah and his boss, Mr Williams Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, are oblivious of the fact that the Mills-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) government has already taken care of what the NPP is now promising.

“How funny! Bawumiah and his NPP have not bothered to check the fact that in chapter 84 of the Customs Harmonized System (HS code), those equipment are already zero rated. They have not even bothered to check these basic facts before mounting international platforms to make these hollow promises- promises which clearly expose their determination to use lies and empty promises to win power at all cost,” Hon Fifi Kwetey said.

He continued: “Secondly, has the NPP even bothered to establish the ailment plaguing manufacturing and industry first before prescribing their medication? Obviously no! If they had, they would have known that import duty on equipment is not the ailment. So they have rushed to prescribe medicine without knowing the ailment. Are these the doctors who want to save Ghana? Doctors who don’t have a clue about the sickness let alone the medication to prescribe?” According to the Deputy Finance Minister, “An accurate diagnosis of the key constraints to industrial and manufacturing transformation will establish that access to reliable and relatively cheaper energy is the most binding constraint in Ghana. This was recently confirmed in an extensive diagnostic analysis done by top US and Ghanaian experts. But obviously the desperate NPP, wanting to deceive the country has no iota of this knowledge and goes promising what is already available to Ghanaian industries.”

Recapping myriads of NPP’s broken promises in the past, this is what Hon Fifi Kwetey had to say: “How trustworthy are these pathological promise breakers anyway? What did they do about the promise of boosting local rice production and reducing it by a third- a promise made in the year 2000? What did they do? They rather took rice import from 100 million dollars to over 500 million dollars. In the process they, who claimed they were bringing a golden age for local producers, supervised the collapse of local industries, cotton industry, fishing industry, timber industry, poultry industry, textile industry and even their own Presidential Special Initiatives (PSIs) collapsed under their watch.”

“Are we surprised about the wrong diagnosis and medication by the ever blundering Bawumiah and his flagbearer? No! It was the same blind diagnosis we have seen in the area of secondary education where the obvious fact that the most compelling problem facing secondary education, which is access to education followed closely by quality of tuition, is lost on them and they are rather giving the wrong prescription of free education. As if free education per se would solve the hydra headed problem of lack of access facing thousands of eligible students and also solve the challenges of raising the quality of tuition,” Hon Fifi Kwetey pointed out.

“How ignorant can Bawumiah be? Can't he and the NPP check their facts before rushing to speak? How safe will Ghana be under the hands of these dangerous doctors who cannot diagnose properly let alone prescribe proper medication? God have mercy on Ghana!” he stated.