No president has gotten away with what Akufo-Addo is getting away with - Ablakwa stings media

Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Member of Parliament for North Tongu, has blamed the media for giving President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo a pass in the face of his refusal to engage the media directly since 2020.

The lawmaker in a social media post dated April 20, 2024, observed that the president is getting away with things that other Fourth Republican presidents did not get the luxury of enjoying relative to media scrutiny.

"President Akufo-Addo is arguably the only president in the world who has not held an open media engagement to take unfiltered questions from journalists in over 4 years.

"I am really surprised the Ghanaian media has accepted this unhealthy development as a new normal.

"No Ghanaian president has been allowed to get away with what Akufo-Addo is getting away with — absolutely despicable!" his post concluded.

The post was premised on ongoing power outages (i.e. dumsor), with Ablakwa stressing that the havoc and agony dumsor was causing merited a direct intervention by the president.

His post read: "DUMSOR is traumatizing millions, collapsing businesses, destroying electrical equipment and causing untold agony.

"It is time President Akufo-Addo holds a direct engagement with the Ghanaian people through a press conference and a people’s assembly which would enable him come to terms with the current reality instead of listening to his deceptive, inept and arrogant appointees who insult us by asking that we prepare our own DUMSOR timetable."

The issue of power outages have become topical with the government insisting that the outages did not merit a timetable.

The power distributor has also come under heavy critique over its failure to admit the current challenges merit a timetable despite a ruling by the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) to that effect.

SARA