The New Patriotic Party (NPP) vice presidential candidate for the 2012 elections, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has accused the John Mahama-led administration of using state resources to buy its way through the election, plunging the country into difficulties.

According to Dr Bawumia, the money spent on buying cars for chiefs and opinion leaders as well as the sharing of laptop computers to students, among other freebies dished out to few individuals during the election, was not coming from anywhere but state resources in order to buy votes.

The reckless spending, he said, was the cause of the current unprecedented hardship being currently experienced in the annals of the country.

“At the end of 2012, Ghana’s budget deficit was a gargantuan GH¢8.7 billion, amounting to 12.0% of GDP using the rebased GDP numbers. This is the highest recorded budget deficit in Ghana’s history,” Bawumia told NPP members in the United States of America.

Speaking at the NPP United States branch delegates conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dr Bawumia said the reckless spending by the government during the 2012 election was the foundation of the current hopeless situation in the country.

He said Ghanaians did not deserve the harsh economic treatment being meted to them in the hands of the Mahama administration.

“We are being told that this is only the first gear! If this is just the first gear, then as they say in my neck of the woods, “we don’t die finish!”

Why are we still in the first gear after five years of NDC governance, he asked rhetorically.

However, Dr Bawumia said Ghanaians should not be fooled into believing the Mahama regime was a new NDC government. “Let us make no mistake about it, the NDC is now in its sixth year of government and let us not allow them to hoodwink us into thinking this is their first year,” he stated.

He added that the untold hardships Ghanaians were going through after five years of the ‘Better Ghana Agenda’, should be a wake-up call for everybody, adding, “Parents are having a hard time with school fees.”

Using economic indices to explain his points, he said after the NDC inheriting a sound footing economy, it threw caution to the wind by embarking on reckless spending in order to win the election at all cost.

“The government abandoned all fiscal discipline in an attempt to win the 2012 elections. Gifts of cars, 4×4 vehicles to chiefs and opinion leaders, laptops, tractors, money, among others, were extended to buy votes,” he stated.

This maladministration, he explained was the seed sown for the current pay cut and withdrawal of allowances for student professionals.

“For the teachers and nursing trainees whose allowances have been stopped, we now know that it was their allowances that were being ‘chopped nyafu nyafu ‘during the election campaign.

“For workers whose wages are in arrears and are being threatened with a freeze, we now know that it was their wages that this NDC government was ‘chopping nyafu nyafu’ during the election campaign,” he stressed.

He said it was not surprising that workers’ salaries were in arrears as well as statutory payments like the District Assembly Common Fund (DACF), Ghana Education Trust Fund, GETFund and the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) levies.