Former MP for Zebilla and NPP member, John Akparibo Ndebugri says the Africawatch Magazine’s Political Performance Index’s grading of the President, John Mills was magnanimous.
The index scored Professor Mills a B for foreign policy, C- on the economy, C on social interventions and B+ for national security. Mr. Ndebugri supported the NPP General Secretary’s position that the President should have had a worse grade than the B accorded him by the index particularly on foreign policy.
The NPP scribe, Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie told Citi FM soon after the release of the index that the President did not deserve the score, since in his view Professor Mills has been sleeping on the job.
The comment incurred sharp disapproval from government officials, with Deputy Tourism minister Kobby Acheampong classifying Mr. Owusu Afriyie’s views as eccentric and uncivilized. But speaking on Citi FM’s current affairs programme, “The Big Issue” on Saturday October 23, Mr. Ndebugri said he would have failed the former law lecturer for performing below average.
“I for example think that the grading for the president was not appropriate because if I were grading for social intervention and economic development, I would have given him F minus F minus. I would have introduced an F minus which means below fail because of what I feel in my pocket not because I dislike the president. Somebody who made me a Lawyer, how would I dislike him? I am sure that Sir John also had had his stint with him as a lecturer” he explained. “The important point I am making is that, the man is our president and he promised that he will make our lives comfortable or reasonably comfortable. We don’t feel so comfortable and so we think that in the absence of the comfort he promised us, he must be sleeping on the job. That is not an insult, it is a criticism and the solution to it was for Kobby to have proved that the President had done A or B not to say that Sir John was behaving like a villager” he added.
“I have also seen some very subtle strategy of the NDC in so far as this heightening of the political temperature is concerned. In fact the NDC is in the forefront of always creating a situation that will give the impression that the political landscape is consisting of insults and so on, so that the social reaction to it will save them from criticism. So they are busily confusing criticism with insults. When you are critical of the president, they say you are insulting them” Ndebugri noted.
Deputy NDC General Secretary, Kofi Adams, a panelist on the programme strongly refuted Mr. Ndebugri’s claims saying the NPP was often responsible for most of the insults that characterized several public discourses.
