Haruna Iddrisu, Minority leader
Our political system, it is more than a truism, is characterised by the vicissitudenous scenario of political parties coming in and out of power, and it is not overly unusual for the party in opposition to constructively criticize the party in power.
Notwithstanding this conventional establishment which is not foreign to us, it is worrisome, by every stretch of the imagination, for an opposition party to go to great pains to sow seeds of animosity in the populace against a government that has been in office for not more than four months!
The Haruna Iddrisu-led depleted force, on May Day, in their relentless pursuit to blemish the good works of the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia administration, creates the fallacious impression that Ghana under Akufo-Addo has filed for some sort of bankruptcy protection because everything has gone awry!
They carry themselves as though under John Mahama we were dwelling in some paradisaical abode where we were nurtured with honey and milk, and a change in government has been able to, within these past hundred days, change Ghana into a land of perdition and gnashing of teeth!
They say Akufo-Addo has compounded the plights of ordinary Ghanaians. They say, rather strangely, that transport fares have seen a 15% upward adjustment under Akufo-Addo, and this amply indicates that the governing New Patriotic Party doesn't have the proclivity as well as the competence to generate ideas ideal to solve the innumerable challenges facing the people.
Such gloomily descriptive scenes of a government whose stewardship over affairs of the state in the past hundred days surpasses what could easily qualify to be called normalcy, makes one wonder if Haruna Iddrisu and his team of drowsy lots have been in this country all these years!
Without wasting so much of time digesting the various themes which informed their near-to-useless press statement, it is imperative for the people of Ghana to know that most of the facts presented have been distorted. The realities on the ground are not in sync with the doleful pictures they wanted to ferry across.
The increase in transportation fares was contingent on the fact that the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur administration would not allow the transport unions to correspondingly adjust their fares when prices of petroleum products went up on more occasions than we can count in the whole of 2016.
If they had allowed fares to be increased according to price hikes in petroleum products, the Akufo-Addo administration would not have allowed any increase in transportation fares.
The pockets of challenges being faced by Ghanaians are evidences of their incompetence while in government between 2009 and 2016. We are witnessing remnants? of their incompetent leadership of the Ghanaian economy.
I wonder if the minority was under compulsion to release a statement on such an occasion because they appeared ill-prepared and the information contained in the release is not only scanty but highly unreliable.
Haruna Iddrisu should know that hearts are not won with massaged figures and facts! The New Patriotic Party and the Akufo-Addo administration have been given four years to execute their vision for the country, but not four months! Not even David Copperfield, the famed magician, could have transformed such a wobble economy in four months!
The opposition National Democratic Congress is irremediably tattered, and much of their concentration should be on rekindling their bated hopes to present a semblance of a good opposition party, but not this disjointed and uncoordinated exterior they appear to be exhibiting.
