Credit originators of ideas – Amoako Baah to politicians

Ghanaian politicians should be candid and acknowledge originators of ideas they pick for their campaigns, Dr Richard Amoako Baah, a lecturer in political science at the Kwame Nkrumah University and Science has admonished.

His comments come in the wake of accusations and counter-accusations between the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) over ideas that the latter claims are theirs but the former has “stolen”.

Addressing a press conference in Accra on Wednesday, 14 September, the Communications Director of the NPP, Nana Akomea, said the NDC “steals our policies and cannot implement them”.

He continued: “They even steal the title of our manifesto, so they have no deep attachment to the principles necessary to drive the promises they give. To them politics is all about ways and means. Nothing to do with actually making lives better.”

The president, he continued, “steals ideas from his political opponents only to be found wanting when it comes to implementing them”.

Commenting on the issue on Class FM’s Executive Breakfast Show on Thursday, September 15, Dr Baah explained that a person who takes the idea of another and does not give due recognition was “dishonest”.

He admitted that ideas do not belong to one person and people borrow from each other all over the world. However, “when you think an idea is good and you wish to take it you must be honest to say: ‘We feel this is a good idea and we want to do it too but we will do it in a different way’”.

For him, “It looks as if when Nana Addo goes somewhere and, for example, he says he will make another region out of Western Region or 1-district-1-factory, then you hear the NDC also say 1-household-1-meter and suddenly they want to create five more regions. What do you make of that? It is just too coincidental.”

For him, the NDC could have conceived an idea “but he [Nana Addo] was the one who said it first and, therefore, it is his idea; it is very simple”.

According to him, unless the second person who comes to talk about the ideas can prove that he had documented it before it was made public by the other person, he should just acknowledge the other because he made it public first.

Meanwhile, the NPP Communications Director has explained some of the policies they believe their opponents have stolen.

He stated:

• For example, Nana Akufo-Addo is promising to trigger the constitutional process to create new regions when elected in 2016

• President Mahama now says he is also planning to trigger a similar process to create new regions.

• Nana Akufo-Addo promises to have district/municipal chief executives elected.

• President Mahama also promises to elect DCEs. This is after the NDC in 2011 issued a White Paper against the recommendation of the Constitution Review Commission to have DCEs/MCEs elected if re-elected this December.

• NPP promises to create new geographical development authorities to oversee the deliberate development of every inhabited corner of the country.

• President Mahama yesterday gave the same promise.

• In March 2016, Akufo-Addo announced to the chiefs and people of Suma Ahenkro, in Jaman North, Brong-Ahafo Region, that as part of his plans to transform cashew farming into a major cash crop and export earner for Ghana, he will establish a Cashew Marketing Board to regulate the industry and provide a ready market just as it is done for cocoa.

• Last night, President Mahama stole from Akufo-Addo yet again, saying, “We will establish a cashew board with its headquarters in the Brong Ahafo Region."

• NPP was implementing ‘One Child One Laptop’ by 2008, a policy spearheaded by the late Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, President Kufuor’s Finance Minister.

• President Mahama is today promising to also give away one tablet per child after the NDC killed that scheme in 2009, only to make it seem like a new idea and a new promise today.

• The NPP had a Deputy Minister of Education in charge of Technical Education – Kwame Ampofo Twumasi was Deputy Minister of Education, Youth & Sports in charge of Technical Education in 2008.

• The NDC elected to abandon it in 2009, only for President Mahama to re-introduce it now as a new idea he wishes to implement if re-elected.

• NPP promises to implement in 2017 the National ID cards which President Mahama has totally abandoned since he took office.

• President Mahama, after listening to Dr Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia last Thursday, now promises to do the same if re-elected.

• If re-elected, the President has repeated his 2008 promise given at the KNUST Energy Forum that an NDC government will provide "energy security" in Ghana before 2012. Yesterday he repeated, “We will have off-takers for excess electricity” produced here in Ghana. He again made this promise in 2012 that Ghana would be exporting power if elected, only to hit Ghana with the longest power crisis on record.

• After watching many potential investors in our petroleum industry leave the country, President Mahama says he wants Ghana to become “the petroleum hub of West Africa”.

• In its 2012 manifesto, the NPP promised to make the Western Region “the hub of the oil & gas industry” in West Africa. Earlier, on several platforms, including a speech delivered in Houston, Texas, in February 2012, Nana Akufo-Addo said the NPP was, looking at how Houston had successfully managed their petroleum industry through "the diversification and industrialisation of a state that used to be dependent on cotton. It is this model of the integrated petrochemical industry that we seek to build in Ghana, servicing the entire oil-rich West Africa."

• President Mahama says it is his intention that "Ghana will have the best road network in West Africa by 2021”. Now, we all know what the president means when he describes a road as best, don’t we? Just last June he described the Dodo-Pepesu-Nkwanta road he was commissioning in these terms: “… If you take a look at the quality of the road, you can only admire the good work done. I don’t think that there is any other road in Ghana that is more pleasant to the eye than this one… I also want to take the opportunity to thank Messrs Oumaru Kanazoe Construction Limited of Burkina Faso for the very high quality of work they have done on this stretch of road. As I have said, this is one of the best quality roads in Ghana today, and I will urge the Minister of Roads & Highways to bring other contractors to come and see so that they can emulate it in other parts of the country.”

• In the same month, just two weeks after the road was commissioned, the Nkwanta South DCE, Alfred Kofi Wukanye, took the media on a tour to see for themselves the potholes that had developed on the €26 million road done by the man who confessed to bribing the president with an American car

• In the words of one commentator, I K Gyasi, the President “poured fulsome and unstinted praise on the contractors, Messrs Umarou Kanazoe Construction Limited of Burkina Faso, and his bosom friend, Mr Jibril Kanazoe, the owner of the company, the same person who, out of eternal gratitude for [winning contracts in Ghana], returned favours by buying a 2010 Ford Expedition vehicle for President Mahama”

• The President says if Ghanaians make the mistake to re-elect him in 83 days’ time, it will mark “the beginning of new glory days of the railway sector”. Thankfully, he has given us a taste of what would happen to the billions of dollars of railway cash if Ghanaians make the mistake to give him another term. The GHS3.5 million money that was fraudulently used for that corrupt bus-branding deal, was cash meant for the railway sector

• He says he will “expand the investment under SADA to construct more irrigation facilities”. Recalling how some $200 million of SADA money flew away illegally to irrigate corrupt private pockets, what the President actually means to say is that he will give away more money through corruption in the false name of the people in the North. If he has failed to prosecute one single person for the hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from the people of the North through SADA, then why would throwing more money at it deter any corrupt person from doing the same thing?

• The president says the IMF programme he forced Ghana through “will be the last”. We must remind him that NPP successfully weaned Ghana off the IMF in 2007 and

• He says he is laying the same foundation he told Ghanaians he had laid in 2012. What stops him from promising another foundation in 2020 just to be consistent?

“The 2016 NDC manifesto is also noted for repeating failed promises. The NDC in 2008 promised to create full employment. Instead, what they did was to build a strong foundation for creating massive unemployment. NYEP left NDC 110,000 employed. Today, its replacement after the scandalously corrupt GYEEDA, YES, admits now has less than 70,000 young people employed,” Nana Akomea said.