I wasn’t a lucky son – Akufo-Addo tells story

President Akufo-Addo yesterday told a bit of the sorry state in which he met the coffers of the nation.

This was when members of the Upper East Regional House of Chiefs paid a courtesy call on him at the Flagstaff House with a number of concerns that needed attention, chief among which had to do with bad roads.

Whilst he appreciated the concerns raised by the chiefs and wished he could do more to salvage the situation, the president said, “I wasn’t a lucky son; I didn’t inherit from my father a lot of money.”

Instead, he said, “I inherited an empty treasury; so we are now trying to build up the treasury.”

That notwithstanding, President Akufo-Addo assured, “I’m determined to make sure that the teachings of the Constitution which require an even spread of the distribution of the nation’s resources and development, are maintained in my time so that even within these constrained public finances, there is an even spread of development across the country.

“We don’t want to be moving forward in Ghana leaving anybody behind; we all want to move together along a broad front.”

That, according to him, is the spirit with which he and members of his barely 11-month-old government are understanding the prioritization and budgeting of Ghana’s resources to make sure that they pull all to go along the same way.

President Akufo-Addo said the issue of the Upper East Region was a matter of great concern to him and his government.

That, he said, was because “after the Volta Region, it [Upper East] is the weakest region for the NPP; so we need to do some extra work there to bring the region on board.”

He promised the chiefs and people in the region, saying, “I’m determined to make the Upper East Region a major target of mine.”

Going forward, President Akufo-Addo underscored, “A lot of the things have to be priorities; we’ll prioritize the things that have to be done immediately and others in the course of time.”