Acknowledge positive legacies inherited -NDC to NPP

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has urged the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) to acknowledge the positive legacies it inherited from the NDC administration.

The NDC said: "Our problem with the NPP has never been about comparing the two administrations. Our problem has always been about their refusal to acknowledge the positive legacies they inherited from the NDC and literally 'stealing' NDC policies, programmes and projects and passing them off as their own".

The NDC was reacting to accusations the NPP National Chairman, Mr. Haruna Esseku's allegedly levelled against it at a press conference on February 26, challenging the opposition parties to go to the hinterland to see for themselves how those areas were being developed under the current administration.

The statement signed by Mr. Lee Ocran, NDC National Vice-Chairman, described the challenge as "a ridiculous piece of political theatre" which could pass as a joke. It said the NPP Chairman's rhetoric at his press conference was "symptomatic of a party that is traditionally arrogant, elitist and snobbish."

The NDC said the NPP should be held to its own timetable promises to the people of Ghana, which they "voluntarily and consciously set out in its manifesto and proclaimed on its political platform. "It is a fact that the NPP has done only two years of its four-year tenure. But it is also a fact that many of the NPP promises were time-bound."

The NDC said the NPP promised to establish a national youth corps to create at least 100,000 jobs by the end of its first year in office and even more in subsequent years.

"The party also promised to designate the Afram Plains as a grain basket and confer on it a special food production programme on a pilot scale for replication in other regions in the country after two years" and so many others, the statement claimed.

It said for NPP to say that it made the promises without knowing that the NDC government had dissipated the finances of the country was not true since "the NDC never hid the realities of the economy and the nation's finances from the Ghanaian people after the nation was hit by the dual external shocks of a sudden drastic fall in cocoa prices and sharp increases in crude oil prices in the second half of 1999.

"Instead of listening, the NPP was busy making those promises, again playing the ostrich, hiding its head in the sand and organising and leading street demonstrations to blame the NDC government for the difficulties of those times.

"Under the NPP administration, cocoa prices have hit the highest levels in 25 years at 2,400 dollars per tonne; gold prices have reached record levels of 350 dollars per ounce, and for declaring Ghana HIPC, debt repayment has been halved." The statement continued: "It is only in the last six months that crude oil prices have risen from the 18 dollars per barrel it fell to in 2001 to 32 dollars per barrel.

"In spite of all those favourable economic parameters, the economy is tottering. The exchange rate has depreciated by over 15 per cent in one year, and the inflation rate is rising again.

The NDC said it took in good faith President John Agyekum Kufuor's call for "an all-party rally to meet the challenges of the times," adding that it was therefore strange for the President's party Chairman to come out a week after that call to castigate those very same parties.

It said the NPP learnt no lessons from its short period in office between 1969-1972 when the same arrogance, self-centeredness and a feeling of superiority caused the downfall of their predecessors, the Progress Party (PP). The NDC declared that it was ready to participate in any discussions aimed at achieving the objectives the President was calling for.