‘Lame-duck’ Ofori-Atta’s approval was an NDC decision, not Minority Leadership – Asiedu Nketia

“If President Akufo-Addo thinks that he wants a lame-duck Minister of Finance, let him have it,” Johnson Asiedu Nketia, the General-Secretary of the NDC has told Joy News in a report GhanaWeb monitored on Wednesday.

Even though some NDC MPs had called for Ofori-Atta’s rejection, Asiedu Nketia a.k.a General Mosquito has indicated that the party did not want to hold back when the president wanted to have a “lame-duck” person like his cousin, Ken Ofori-Atta, to be in charge of the country’s finances.

“There was a party decision that let President Akufo-Addo have his Finance Minister and that has been achieved so what are all these details about who agreed and who didn’t agree. The point is that this was a party decision and it has been implemented so that is the end of the story,” Asiedu Nketsia further revealed.

He continued: “The ordinary person who has no food to eat, cannot pay his bills, doesn’t care who is approving whom. This doesn’t take away the suffering of the masses so our MPs will go back and deal with the situation that affects the daily lives of Ghanaians.”

Asiedu Nketia’s comments about the recent happenings in parliament is a reaction to the displeasure expressed by some NDC party members and some Civil Society groups against the NDC MPs collective decision to approve Ken Ofori-Atta.

The NDC in an earlier statement signed by its General Secretary warned members to be circumspect in their pronouncements. The NDC assured its members that the decision was arrived at in view of the “exigencies of the situation”.

“The ordinary person who has no food to eat, cannot pay the water bills does not care who is approving whom where so the matters of the day are the issues they have to go to the constituency to deal with,” he added.

“So our MPs would go back and then deal with the situation that affects the daily lives of Ghanaians and as I told you, somebody who is having a toothache doesn’t care whether Afghanistan is being bombed elsewhere. There are certain things that are considered extraneous to the average grass root person who cannot find where his next meal is coming from.”