Akufo-Addo fails integrity audit

Opinions on Friday, November 13, 2020

Columnist: Kofi Kakraba

2020-11-13

As President Nana Ado Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s four-year term draws to a close, his record has naturally come under scrutiny and has led to an integrity audit framed by differences between the promises he made to voters during the campaigns for the 2016 elections and what they have achieved after four years.

A huge dynamic range between big promises and accomplishments indicates that the president has failed to deliver on virtually all of the lofty promises he made for voting in 2016.

And the president’s narcissistic claims that he has accomplished more than all of his predecessors, including Ghana’s first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, have prompted very unflattering judgments.

Strictly on the basis of what the president promised in opposition and what he has accomplished in office, the facts indicate that he has backtracked on many of the promises he made or only managed to make unconvincing breakthroughs the one time he tried.

Free Senior High School, the president’s big promotion, has reintroduced the backward-shifting system into schools across the country, and SHS students now have to go to school in shifts in what has been disparagingly referred to as the rotation of the “traffic light”.

Akufo-Addo’s “stoplight”, Free SHS, is solely the result of the populist propaganda that the president had his government do with Ghana’s second cycle of education. Mr. Akufo-Addo had inherited a free SHS system dubbed “progressively free SHS” from his predecessor, John Dramani Mahama.

Mahama had approached the progressively free SHS by targeting bright but needy students at the various scholarship high schools, with the program guided by a vision of gradually improving the program on what President Akufo-Addo had wanted to achieve with his version of the free SHS. .

However, when Akufo-Addo took office in 2017, he shelved the Mahama program and launched his own free SHS that he had promised as a flagship policy in the opposition. In the heat of blind energy, Akufo-Addo did not even pilot Free SHS.

Three years later, Free SHS is a rotating stoplight that has reintroduced the dreaded round robin system, which all governments prior to the current government had fought to a point where it was on the verge of being defeated before Akufo-Addo became President. Now, all the gains against the shift system have been lost, at least at the high school level.

But heading into the 2020 election, this Free SHS is the president’s best achievement, even though the Free SHS he promised in opposition was markedly different from what he has delivered.

While in opposition, President Akufo-Addo promised to build 275 factories under the “One District, One Factory (1D1F)” program. It should be remembered that the then candidate Akufo-Addo had insisted that Ghana had the money to pay the factories in one go, upholding the claim during a BBC interview in 2016 in which he had promised that the project had been calculated and that I would. make the cost available to Ghanaians.

Since coming to power, the government has not built a single factory. Rather, it has been promoting cottage industries and mid-level manufacturing setups by private entrepreneurs as factories under the 1d1f programs.

Akufo-Addo government spokesman, Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has also noted that the president, while in opposition, never promised to build factories in the country’s 275 districts.

Again in opposition, Akufo-Addo had promised to build a dam in every village in Ghana. Since then, the government has claimed, while in office, that it did not promise to build dams in all towns, but only in the northern part of the country to help weather the dry seasons in the area.

Meanwhile, in place of the dams promised in the opposition, the government has been building canoes, some of which are often dragged during the rainy season.

When he was in opposition, then-candidate Akufo-Addo promised to work with a lean government, criticizing the then Mahama government, which had just over 90 ministers. However, immediately after his election, Akufo-Addo appointed an unprecedented government of 110 ministers. Since the creation of the six new regions, the number of ministers has increased to 124.

Similarly, a power-hungry Akufo-Addo vowed in opposition not to lead a government of family and friends, berating then-President Mahama, who had only one cousin, Joyce Bawa Mogtari, in his government. After becoming president, Akufo-Addo has been running the worst government of family and friends in the country’s history, with his blood relatives, including daughters, cousins, brothers, and nephews scattered throughout his government.

President Akufo-Addo has even appointed former girlfriends and baby mothers to ambassadorial positions. Since then, the administration has been justifying nepotism with the claim that there are too many brilliant people in the president’s family – that’s why.

As he craved power in the opposition, Akufo-Addo had promised that his administration would allocate $ 1 million to each constituency each year if voted for by him. That policy never saw the light after his election.

Since then, the government has been claiming that it had promised to allocate the money, in other forms than cash, to constituencies.

President Akufo-Addo’s administration has had the largest number of corruption scandals in government history, with some liberal counts putting the count in the region of more than three hundred (more than 300). This is different from his promise in the opposition to fight corruption with a fine tooth comb, including a so-called “Anas principle” that never happened after he took office.

Many illegal miners, (galamseyers) have promised to vote against Akufo-Addo in 2020 because when he was in opposition in 2016, he had vowed never to end galamsey and obtained campaign funds from these illegal miners.

However, immediately after he took office, the president turned around and banned the galamsey, sending soldiers and Homeland Security to arrest and seize the galamseyers’ equipment that would later be shared among his appointees.

When he was in the opposition, Mr. Akufo-Addo had promised not to borrow like the Mahama government was doing, claiming that Ghana was sitting on the money, but that it was incompetence and mismanagement that was causing difficulties. Since taking office, Akufo-Addo has borrowed more than any other president before him, raising Ghana’s debt-to-GDP ratio to HIPC.

President Akufo-Addo had even gone to eat local dishes like ‘ampesie’, ‘banku’ and ‘fufu’ publicly when he was in opposition and campaigning for votes. But after he came to power, the president declared in 2017 that he loves the Lebanese.