JJ goes overdrive

President Jerry Rawlings says some neighbouring countries have been pumping money to the opposition parties because they believe that Ghana will slide back into the woods when the opposition parties come to power.

“My friends there are some countries who are jealous of our stability and are pumping money to the opposition because they know that when they come, this country will slide back”, the President said in an address that was captured by GTV Sunday evening news.

Addressing a rally of National Democratic Congress (NDC) supporters at the Jackson Park in Koforidua the Regional capital of the Eastern Region, Rawlings said Ghana has come too far for the country to be given to the opposition, whom he said, would destroy its economic base.

He reiterated a statement he made a fortnight ago in the Northern Region that American President Bill Clinton had introduced a Japanese investor to him during his visit to Ghana in 1998 and that the said Japanese was organising a consortium of investors to finance a railway line from Accra through Burkina Faso to Mali.

On his part, Vice President John Evans Atta Mills criticised plans by the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to collate their own results for this year’s elections.

Mills said it was wrong for an examiner in an examination to be a marker at the same time.

The issue of the Voter’s Register being bloated is a problem for the NDC as well as the other parties, he said, and called on the other political parties to ensure that the register is cleaned of the existing ghost names.

The running mate of the NDC’s flagbearer Mr. Martin Amidu urged the electorate to retain the NDC in power because in his view, Mills was the only person who has exhibited concerns on the need to ensure peace in Ghana.

Meanwhile in his address to thousands of supporters who braced the rain to turn up at a rally at the Koforidua Prisons Park, the NPP flagbearer, John Agyekum Kufuor warned the ruling NDC not to entertain any notion of rigging this year’s elections. He said any such action would see people taking to the streets to demonstrate their dissatisfaction as happened in recent cases in Yugoslavia and the Ivory Coast.

The incumbent MP and NPP parliamentary candidate for New Juaben North, Mr. Hackman Owusu Agyeman asked what the NDC wanted to continue when it has failed in almost every sphere of life in managing the economy.

Is it the joblessness and unemployment that they have left us that you want them to continue? Is it the white-collar corruption that you want them to continue? Or is it the hopelessness and despair that you want them to continue?, he asked.

The shadow Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Nana Akufo Addo, said the NPP is coasting to victory in the elections.