“Please tell the NDC to have patience; they must be in no rush to Dec 7…Trust Nana, he may be unusually ambitious but he usually puts his mouth where his ambition is.”

That is the advice a nephew to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has issued to some leaders of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) who have doubted a latest promise by the president to invest heavily in the health sector.

President Akufo-Addo in his eighth address to the nation on measures taken by his government to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus made new promises which including the construction of some health facilities across the country.

To top up, the president said the construction excepted to begin this year will be completed for use in a year.

These promises were outrightly ruled as unattainable by some members of the opposition NDC and a section of Ghanaians who claimed it is another figment of ‘Nana Showboy’s’ imagination.

But Gabby Otchere Darko says such pessimists only need patience to witness the transformation the president will bring to the health sector in the coming year.

In a response on his Facebook page, Mr Otchere Darko described the president as an “unusually ambitious” person who “puts his mouth where his ambition is”.

He cited the several interventions the president put in place during the banking crisis and more recently, the slashing of utility bills for Ghanaians amidst the coronavirus pandemic as reasons to trust that he’ll deliver.

Gabby Otchere Darko’s post reads in part, “I’ve heard some senior NDC politicians making jokes that there is simply no money budgeted for health in 2020 to allow the President to deliver 88 hospitals. Well, there wasn’t COVID-19 when the budget was made. There wasn’t any 50% subsidy for electricity and 100% free water in the budget but that and many more are happening.”

“The same way, before COVID-19, there was no budget for collapsed banks, savings & loans, etc and yet this government found the money… When Akufo-Addo’s Cabinet sat until 2am last Thursday they didn’t do that to drink tea and chew cream crackers. They were dissecting every aspect of this most ambitious health infrastructure programme ever to be rolled out since Independence”

President Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo in his address, Sunday evening, noted that the global pandemic has exposed the ailing health sector and ignited the need for his government to pay more attention, hence the decision to have the largest health investment in the history of the nation.

These include amongst others the construction of “88 hospitals in the districts without hospitals….Each of them will be a quality, standard design 100-bed hospital with accommodation for doctors, nurses and other health workers and the intention is to complete them within a year… and the construction of six new regional hospitals in the six new regions and the rehabilitation of the Efia Nkwanta Hospital in Sekondi...”