Kufuor will need a lot of Kneepads - Gambia's Prez

....Jameh’s attack Kufuor & 3 others
Gambian president, Yaya Jameh has launched a blistering attack on his Ghanaian counterpart and others on the continent who have expressed optimism about the possible impact of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).

Jameh told an anniversary parade in the Gambian capital, Banjul that African leaders like president Kufuor will need a lot of kneepads because they will have to kneel and beg the West for a long time and to no avail.

The West will never deliver on its promises and unless African leaders realise that socio-economic development ought to come from ourselves, we will not go anywhere, he told a cheering crowd.

Other African leaders who have thrown their full weight behind NEPAD include presidents Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal.

Even classical western economists agree that NEPAD does not in anyway depart from the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), which has been implemented over the last 25 years in Africa with disastrous consequences.

In Ghana, after 18 years of implementing SAP, the Rawlings regime left office with an internal debt of ?43 trillion and an external debt of $6billion, a report published in the private-owned Insight indicates.

Access to healthcare and education was significantly reduced over the period as a result of the withdrawal of subsidies.

Under the marching orders of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) close to 400,000 workers had been retrenched and viable state enterprises were sold off to foreign private capital interests.

According to the paper, “NEPAD will follow the same path of neo-liberalism and its consequences of the economic and social programmes implemented by the PNDC and the NDC.

Kufuor and other African leaders have expressed optimism that NEPAD will provide answers to the many problems of development facing the African people. The claims of the leaders have been sharply rebuffed by radical African intellectuals.

Mr. Suhuyini Nbangba, a Ghanaian resident in the Gambia says, “Gullible African leaders, intellectually bankrupt as they always are, have allowed themselves to be ridiculed by their local and western economic advisers. “This time round, they have been hoodwinked into adopting a 201-point nonsensical package of a so-called African Renaissance project christened “New Partnership for Africa’s Development.”

“The foremost among the shameless stooges dishonestly claiming authorship of the bogus document are Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade, Nigeria’s Obasanjo and South Africa’s Mbeki.”

According to Nbangba, “NEPAD is now gathering momentum with conference upon conference being organised to extol its virtues. It is therefore our duty to expose this canker worm that it is.”