Though the campaign for the 2012 is yet to gain momentum, the two leading political parties are jostling each other for favourable public attention as they argue over which party has performed better on the political scale.
The occasional politics of insults paved way for the politics of ‘who is who’ on Thursday when two personalities – Felix Ofosu Kwakye from the ruling National Democratic Congress, and Abu Jinapor of the opposition New Patriotic Party – engaged in a banter on Joy Fm’s Top Story.
The two were dissecting claims by the former President John Agyekum Kufuor that the NPP was given a raw deal in the last general elections. Addressing the maiden edition of the Liberty Lectures held in Accra Wednesday, President Kufuor remarked that the current hardships Ghanaians are facing could have been avoided if they had retained the NPP in power.
But Mr Felix Ofosu Kwakye thinks the former president’s propensity to fight for the cause of Ghanaians is a charade.
According to him, it was “regrettable and unfortunate” for a man of Mr Kufuor’s standing to play on the minds of Ghanaians that the NDC has brought hardship into the country, alluding to the fact that when President Kufuor asked Ghanaians to use the 2008 elections as a referendum on his eight-year rule, he received a “negative verdict” on his performance – as Ghanaians voted against the NPP.
“It is also an irony that president Kufuor will today be complaining of hardship. It would be recalled that 2008, in the height of spiraling food prices all over the country, when Ghanaians complained of hardship, President Kufuor branded them as lazy people. So it is shocking that the same man will turn around purport to be speaking for the ordinary people of this country, who have witnessed considerable levels of improvement in the standards of living under the President Mills’ presidency.”
He said when in government, the NPP measured the health and performance of the Ghanaian economy using micro economic stability, reduction in interest rate and inflation, adding, “it stands to reason that to the extent that the NDC government has bettered all these indices, this government has done far, far better than the Kufuor administration”.
He further stated: “The NDC government, beyond this sterling performance of handling micro economic indices, has moved a step further to introduce numerous interventions to cushion the people of this country from some of these difficulties that might confront them.”
But Abu Jinapor of the NPP emphasized that what President Kufuor outlined at the lecture was just reechoing the hardship Ghanaians are going through under Mills’ leadership.
“The statement made by the distinguished and illustrious former president of this country, John Agyekum Kufuor, is a reflection of the sentiments being expressed on a daily basis by the Ghanaian people.”
Touching on the economic indicators, he stressed that “a critical comparative analysis between the NPP’s regime and NDC’s regime will tell you that the first two and half years of President Kufuor’s administration, per all these indicators, the NPP did far, far better.”
He expounded his stance: “We inherited an inflationary figure of 40%, and brought it down to about twenty something per cent within two and half years, and that obviously is much more commendable than what they have been able to achieve in their first two and half years.”