We can’t fix this country based on partisan lines - Yarboi Annan

A former New Patriotic Party(NPP) Parliamentary Candidate aspirant for the Odododiodoo constituency Michael Nii Yarboi Annan, has added his voice to the #FixTheCountry tirade by saying that we cannot fix the country based on partisan lines.

He said this in an interview with Berla Mundi on the New Day show on TV3, Wednesday, May 5.

Mr. Annan who defected to the National Democratic Congress(NDC) during the 2020 December 7 election, was reacting to the recent tirade by Ghanaians against the government on Twitter for the non-progressive stewardship of the country even though we vote every four years for better leadership to steer the affairs of the economy.

He said “even before my primaries, I have always come out very principled with my views, I believe that we cannot fix this country based on partisan lines, which is what we have been doing, so yes, I belonged to the NPP, I saw most of the things people are complaining about today right, I saw it three years ago, you can check all my write ups, you can check all the articles that I churned out. I started speaking about these things and people within the NPP that I so much thought were business-minded did not take kindly to some of these things.

“Yes, I mean, I walk into places and it’s like, hey that’s the guy coming, that’s the troublemaker because I was criticising my own people. Now, if we fail to be truthful to the system right, only to come today and say fix it, I mean who caused it? It is all of us, our silence right, that gave them the verve to think that they could do and go on the tangent that they went on”.

He further went on to criticize the lack of concerted effort in getting full value for the various governments’ attempts at industrializing the country along the lines of the many natural resources in the country.

“If you put one factory in Cape Coast to feed on the crops that are grown in Cape Coast and just produce and let it go, then what have you done? Nothing. There must be a concerted effort at getting full value in whatever we decide to industrialize, for instance, you cannot say you are industrializing everything but we can say that let’s industrialize palm, so the first thing is, we grow enough palm, now when we harvest, it’s the palm. So let government lead a concerted effort to make sure that we can replace the Indonesians and Malaysians even here in Africa alone, Africa alone demands for palm oil is 4 million metric tonnes a year, and that is a lot of money”.

Reacting to the government’s renewed crusade on the canker of illegal small-scale mining or galamsey, he said “well it is just one of the efforts that will come to nothing, I think that sometimes we should look at the history of this country, my great-great grandfather was a goldsmith, a very popular goldsmith in Accra, back then, from what we hear and what we were told, they finance the harnessing of gold and all that and that system still exist but on another level.

“Before it used to be our goldsmiths providing money for these activities, when there are sponsors they will surely find ways and means for government to relax its efforts and they will go back because the sponsors are around, they are ever ready and they need the commodity. We would have resolved this if we should start trading here locally in gold actively, gold is a commodity and also a currency, I do not see why we can’t put proper regulations around for us to all benefit from what we extract”.