President Kufuor Is Insincere - Mahama

Barely two days after urging an electioneering campaign devoid of insults and mudslinging, President John Kuffour has been heavily criticized by the leader of the Peoples National Convention Dr Edward Mahama for being insincere in the face of growing hardship by Ghanaians.

Answering questions whiles delivering his New Year message, Mahama said Ghanaians will be celebrating the festivities in hardship because of what he calls the country’s worsening economic situation.

On behalf of the PNC, my family and myself, I wish to use the opportunity of this special time of the year to wish all my fellow citizens and guests from other lands a truly merry Christmas and an equally fulfilling New Year. However, i all sincerity and honesty, I know that conditions are so gloomy that most Ghanaian families would be forced to postpone celebrating this Christmas.

I challenge whoever doubts this to ask at random any ten citizens in our streets or in tro-tro(public mini buses), only to confirm the present hopeless climate that is the cause of long queues at various embassies by Ghanaians struggling to get out of our sinking ship for other lands, just as our doctors, nurses and other professionals readily do.

For similar reasons, children of school-going age are forced to waste the prime of their lives congesting street intersections in our principal cities peddling various cheep imports, sleeping rough at night under the most inhuman conditions imaginable and exposed to rape, licentious sex and sexually transmitted diseases including HIV.

I cannot help comparing all of us in our dear nation to passengers in a bus whose team of driver and mates, the President and his NPP administration, seem more confused than us about where they are taking us.

They keep telling us that we are getting there. Where? With the youth forming the majority of almost 70% of our citizens who are unemployed and urban filth getting worse, our private industries collapsed and their buildings now being used for warehousing rice, sugar, chicken, beef and other imports that our country can easily produce?

Within this past three years of NPP administration, our cedi has continued to decline in value. But, worse than that, this period is the shortest in our post-independence history with petrol prices increasing by 207.7%, gas oil (diesel) and kerosene by 196.7%. cooking oil by 20%, milk by 40%, Milio made from cocoa we produce here in Ghana by 58%, sugar by 83%, punitive rents, unaffordable school fees that are increasing school drop outs and similar indications of declines in every aspect of average standards of living of our population. Yes, even the cost of dying keeps increasing, under the continuing cash and carry system at our hospitals, the cost of coffins and other conditions of disposing off the dead.

Ever since the NPP came to power, it became fashionable that not a day passes without some spectacular scandal involving swindling the nation or stealing billions of cedis, for which very little r nothing is ever heard again about any serious investigations and subsequent prosecutions.

Examples include the Sahara Petroleum deal, the International Financial Consortium (IFC) hoax involving our government, loots through the VRA and a long queue of others that suggest many more lurking in other institutions of national governance.

Tragically, our beloved country keeps getting bled into anemia by various looters of our public treasury through huge financial losses to the state and other predatory strategies for personal gain of privileged public officials and other beneficiaries of the NPP's "golden age of business", a bloated public administration, the rape of our forests and other natural resources and related sordid elements of our current circumstances of economic anarchy.

Indiscipline and open corruption are getting worse everywhere and so blatant that they appear to be part of government policy, much as I admit to great pain and reluctance in coming to this conclusion.

Meanwhile, the NPP administration deserves credit for sustaining a democratic trend that was reborn under our national constitution of 1992 and later intensified by the activities of highly vigilant civil society, private press and private FM radio stations.

There has also been some amount of national stability that we must all sustain, since we in Ghana have similar factors that recently erupted and wrecked several African countries. In this regard, the PNC would like to urge the NPP Administration to recognise the competence with which the National Electoral Commission has conducted the general elections of 1992, 1996 and two in 2000. Instead of derailing their efforts, the NPP must rather offer timely material support, as a clear demonstration of its commitment to our use of ballot box as essential to boosting and guaranteeing national peace, reconciliation and sustaining the democratic process.

In marked contrast, however, personal security has been less than desirable. Worrisome examples that encourage no citizen to take his or her personal security for granted include the Accra Stadium disaster of 2001 that cost the lives of hundred of our youth who unfortunately trusted the state in offering them security whiles enjoying themselves, the brazenly callous and bold manner in which the Ya-naa, a king of that stature, was murdered with impunity on March 27, 2002 and more than a year on, investigations into this heinous crime continue to be inconclusive and ethnic reconciliation in Dagbon remains a distant dream.

Other examples include the generation old ethnic conflict in Bawku that is only an example of dozens of similar flash points that continue to smolder with the government seemingly dry of ideas for reconciliation, armed robbery that has now spread to the rural areas and into the highways of our nation, violence by land guards, the recent clandestine clearing at our airport of consignments of powerful military armaments through channels not approved by competent authorities etc.

We all know too well how our beloved nation is blessed with an abundance of natural resources, some of which, such as forestry and mining are frantically being exploited with no serious efforts at replanting and value-adding investments.

But, far better than natural resources are our human resources of able, hard working, highly competent and enormously ingenious citizens who need only to be encouraged and they would perform more wonders than those that, under the most difficult conditions, are routinely produced at various "magazines" and "ayigbe towns" in our cities or those by our farmers, fishermen and definitely as Ghanaians worldwide keep demonstrating in their respective host environments.

We of the PNC are not omniscient nor do we pretend to have monopoly over answers to all our national problems. However, as demonstrated during the first Republic under the late Dr Kwame Nkrumah and the third republic under the late Dr Hilla Limann, we of the PNC would push further the commitment we have inherited in implementing a truly honest, transparent and people centered government that would combine the power of national reconciliation with tapping the talent and expertise of all our citizens at home and abroad to put Ghana towards achieving reasonable national self-reliance and prosperity. We shall set the example. That is the solemn promise of the PNC for the aftermath of the December 2004 general elections.

On this special occasion when most of us make our resolutions for the year ahead, I wish on behalf of the PNC and myself to encourage every citizen of voting age to resolve in ensuring that he or she is registered to vote, when the voters' registers are opened and later vote a PNC administration for real results.