Former President, John Dramani Mahama, has urged the National Democratic Congress to urgently commence building the Ghana they want together because the country is ‘sailing on perilous seas’.

He said the country’s socio economic foundation has in the last few years not only been threatened, but fractured and dislocated.

Speaking at his formal acceptance speech ceremony at the University for Development Studies in Tamale, the NDC flagbearer said corruption and the raid of the public purse have reached a crescendo. 

He said the rights of the citizens including journalists do not matter to the NPP government, adding that in the last two years Ghana has dropped in the Press Freedom Index.

The National Health Insurance on the other hand, he said, is in comatose; “the scheme is starved of funds by the government capping policy and the refusal to release proceeds of the National Health Insurance levy to the National Health Insurance Authority.

“Patients are faced with an empty scheme which ensures only the retrieval of their medical folders and consultation even basic drugs such as cough mixtures and antibiotics must be purchased by patients themselves.”

He said for the first time in Ghana’s history, retirees who are middle class are facing an existential threat to their survival and financial instability due to ‘gross mismanagement of the country’s economy by a grossly inept finance minister and economic management team’.

”For the first time in known memory newborn babies are unable to access the full complement of their child hood vaccines yet these newborns and the younger generations face the heavy burden of inheriting a suffocating national debt which stands at almost six hundred billion Ghana cedis,” he said.

Mr Mahama said the lack of vision of the NPP government is a patently discomforting reason why the NDC has no option but to win the 2024 elections.

”This is to reset our country on a path of transformation and prosperity. I come to you the good people of Ghana and I say there is hope for our country,” he said.