I feel sad gov’t ignored warnings - Dr. Bawumia

Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, Vice – Presidential Candidate to Nana Akufo-Addo for the 2016 Election has said that he feels sad that the government ignored all the warnings about the unsustainable path on which the country’s economy was placed which has succeeded, unfortunately, in landing Ghana’s economy in the sorry state it is today, and needing rescue from the IMF.

Responding to a question on how he feels when all his economic predictions come true, Dr. Bawumia noted that the issue was not about vindication.

“I feel quite sad. I don’t like to use the word vindicated because it is not about vindication. We are all in this to help the country. My entry into politics was to serve. As you know, I used to be at the Bank of Ghana before I entered politics. The main reason I came into politics was to make a contribution to my country; to serve my people since I thought I could make a difference if given the opportunity,” he disclosed.

“So if you are part of this country and you’ve got expertise in an area and you can see something is going wrong, you should be able to point it out. It is like a mechanic, if you have expertise in repairing a car and you see that the brakes of the car are not working, you can tell the driver that if you don’t repair these brakes, you will have an accident; now if it happens, you will look like you are a prophet but that is not the case, it is just because you can see that this situation is not really tenable and this is what I was warning the government for many years,” he added.

Dr. Bawumia decried the situation where criticisms are politicized and those criticising are attacked when actually, the criticisms are justified and paying heed to those criticisms will go a long way to solving the issues the country is faced with.

“Unfortunately, when you are in politics and you speak, people think that you are only criticising because it is political. But I am a professional, I have a reputation to maintain both domestically and internationally so I cannot just speak for politics. What I speak has to be factually based, has to be backed by data and so it was sad that a lot of the advice that I had given about the economy in terms of us getting to where we are today was largely ignored. You will bear witness that, in fact, sometimes I was insulted for giving that advice but it's turned out that, that has been the case and unfortunately we’ve ended up seeking an IMF Bailout which makes me sad because this country should have been doing better than this,” he said.

Dr. Bawumia was in the Ketu South Constituency on Thursday to meet with Constituency Executives and Communication Team members of the constituency and used the opportunity to visit Holy FM and Victory FM, two of the Radio stations in Aflao which forms part of the Ketu South Constituency.

He was accompanied by Peter Amewu, NPP Volta Regional Chairman and other Regional Executives.