Presidential Candidate of the All People’s Party, Hassan Ayariga, has shared his vision for the economy should he become president of Ghana, during an interview on GhanaWeb TV’s Election Desk.
In a yet-to-be-aired episode, Ayariga introduced his concept of an ‘economic lockdown,’ aimed at transforming Ghana into a hub for production, manufacturing, and industry.
Ayariga said he believes that Ghana has the resources to produce and feed itself, yet the country continues to import goods that he feels can be produced locally.
He argued that the COVID-19 lockdown did not solve any problems for Ghana; instead, it brought hunger to Ghanaians.
“We have to come to what I call economic lockdown production. COVID-19 came and we locked down. We locked down because of a pandemic and when we locked down, we could not produce enough to feed our country. After two weeks of the lockdown, Ghanaians had to come out; Greater Accra to Kumasi, looking for food. Now, what it tells us is that, with the national development plan, we now know that we cannot produce, we cannot manufacture. So, everything we are importing.
“We import over one billion dollars of rice every year. Meanwhile, we have farmlands in all three northern regions and other regions where we can farm and increase rice production so that we don’t have to import. We import over 800 million dollars of cooking oil when we can produce cooking oil using groundnut, soybean, coconut, palm oil, and the rest; yet we spend over 800 million dollars on the importation of oil,” he told Etsey Atisu.
Hassan Ayariga added “Tomatoes and canned tomatoes - we spend same. Chicken and fish - we spend all these things. Now what I want to do with the economic lockdown, is to lock down Ghana so that we’ll become a production, manufacturing and industrial hub.”
Watch a snippet of Ayariga’s interview with GhanaWeb’s Etsey Atisu here:
VKB/AE
