THE Minister of Economic Planning and Regional Co-operation, Dr Paa Kwesi Nduom, has dissociated himself from the statement of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) leadership calling on Ghanaians to stage protest against any upward adjustment in petroleum prices.
He said the statement, attributed to the Chairman of the CPP, Dr Abubakar Alhassan, is wrong, adding that “the chairman of the party needs to update his understanding of Ghana’s economic challenges”.
Dr Nduom, who is also a member of the CPP, made this known in a statement issued in Accra on Friday, calling on Ghanaians to ignore the CPP chairman’s call and the intention expressed.
He said that “since December 2000, when the CPP experienced a humiliating and disastrous election that left the party with only one seat in Parliament, the CPP leadership would rather concern itself with the task of designing policies that would re-invent the CPP to make the party appealing to the masses of Ghanaians.
Dr Nduom said that it is unhealthy for the party to choose to engage in unproductive and dangerous agitation for strikes and boycotts in the face of genuine national economic difficulties.
He said the country will only develop to achieve the level of prosperity that can be spread to reach everyone if bold steps to deal effectively with external as well as domestic debts are taken.
“These problems defy ideological and transcend politics,” Dr Nduom said, adding that “ we must put politics aside and address them in the national interest”.
He called on the CPP leadership to submerge political ambition and make sacrifices that will make Ghanaians a proud and prosperous people.
Dr Ndoum assured Ghanaians that a lot of thought, analysis and care have gone into the discussions on what decisions to take to get the country out of the current economic difficulties.
He conceded that decisions that the government takes may have some short side effects and stressed that “ they will be taken with a view to transforming the nature of our economy in order to enable government to focus its investments in areas that will benefit the poor in society, such as infrastructure, health, education and agriculture”.
He called on the CPP members not to forget about what happened during the tenure of the Limann administration, as impatience, rabble-rousing on the part of some selfish interests, which landed the country into social and economic crisis for several years.
Dr Ndoum said that criticism is good for democracy and stressed that “we must not cross over to promote practices that can disturb out social order, cause anarchy and take us backward again”.
