Flag-bearer hopeful of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom says president JEA Mills has reneged on his duties to provide clear leadership in resolving the impasse regarding the doctors strike. He said arguments that the president did not need to get personally involved as the appropriate state agencies and institutions were handling the crisis are tenuous and backward. “When you have a crisis, [leaders] must rise to the crisis; when they had a crisis in America, Obama had to rise and say ‘this is my solution’. We have a crisis in Ghana, President Mills must rise to say ‘this is my solution, I point the way,’ so the rest can follow,” Dr Nduom told Joy FM’s Super Morning Show host Kojo Oppong Nkrumah. Doctors in public hospitals across the country have been on strike for two weeks now over disagreements relating to their placement on the Single Spine Salary Structure. President Mills has been heard only once asking the doctors to go back to work and even then he received a lot flak when – while appealing to the striking doctors to call of their strike – the president said the erstwhile NPP government simply announced the new pay policy but left behind no funds for its implementation and that his administration was doing its best to implement the policy. Papa Kwesi Nduom said the president ought to be leading the efforts to resolve the issues. “Those who say that the president must not get involved, I’m sorry, he is the Chief Executive of the nation just as you have the chief executive of a company; he must bring to bear, his immense powers, on this and find the power of persuasion [necessary to resolve the impasse]” he stated. That, he sai, was critical because the strike was persisting despite the efforts of state institutions dealing with the crisis. “The technical people have done their job; the Ministry of Finance can do what they’ve put on the table; whatever the doctors say they want they have put on the table; the National Labour Commission can only give some orders but it is not the orders that matter. You must find some powers of persuasion, whether moral suasion or whatever, to [address the concerns of the doctors]” he emphasized.