Opinion: On Vice-President Bawumia’s List of 40 Achievements of the NPP – Part 2 by Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, Ghana’s Vice President

The creation of the Ministry of Inner-City Development – I hope I have the name of this cabinet portfolio written out correctly – and the establishment of the Zongo Development Fund were masterstrokes of the genius of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. They were strokes of genius because these two landmark achievements literally and psychologically put the leaders of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to flight, the latter began to sweat profusely and feel hazy, being that it was the populist leaders of the NDC who had been perennially and publicly pretending to identify with this group that the globally renowned Martinican-Moroccan psychiatrist-philosopher, Dr. Frantz Fanon, once poignantly described as the “Wretched of the Earth.” The NDC leaders had only been pretending to identify with the very group of people they had most totally ignored and effectively marginalized in Ghanaian society for as long as anybody could remember.

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In effect, the creation of the Inner-City Development Ministry and the Zongo Development Fund (ZDF) thoroughly exposed the leaders of the National Democratic Congress for the brazen political opportunists and downright charlatans that those of us avid watchers and students of the postcolonial Ghanaian political landscape have always known them to be. Already, some deeply aggrieved NDC supporters and sympathizers have resorted to calling the Vice-President a liar; but, of course, the solid evidence of these achievements is smack on the ground for all to see. It is their proprietary arrogance that prevents the NDC leaders from recognizing the glaring fact of their blistering failure vis-à-vis the material upliftment of the largely Muslim and northern and foreign migrant population of our Zongos. For far too long, the NDC leaders and apparatchiks had been taking the votes of the Zongo people for granted. Under Nana Akufo-Addo’s tenure the faux-socialist “umbrella-toting” opportunists appeared to have, belatedly, realized the egregious errors of their ways.

Now, what the NPP’s Communication Team Members ought to be doing is to be liaising with the Ministry for Policy Monitoring and Evaluation at the Presidency, Dr. Anthony Akoto Osei, in order to find out about the performance record-card of both the Ministry of Inner-City Development and the operatives of the Zongo Development Fund. It is almost certain that the barely, scarcely, two-year-old Akufo-Addo Administration has registered a far more significant impact on the state and development of our Zongo enclaves, dotted all across the country, than 20 years of governance, or rather gross mis-governance, by the operatives of the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress could barely, if at all, fathom. In short, what is needed here to effectively educate eligible Ghanaian voters and, in fact, the citizenry at large, is for the members of the NPP’s Communication Team to list and meticulously and systematically explain some of the most significant achievements of President Akufo-Addo in this sector of our national life, as well as some of the less obvious but equally significant achievements that have combined to round out the salutary development of this most neglected party of our society and communities.

It is also important to emphasize the fact that the creation of the Inner-City Development Ministry and the establishment of the Zongo Development Fund are not mere happenstance. They come from a master-brain with first-hand experience, being that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is a vintage product of the inner-city, having been born and brought up in the Nima enclave or district of the Accra Metropolis. Nana Akufo-Addo, therefore, does not defer to any of the tough-talking and morally grandstanding leaders of the main opposition National Democratic Congress, least of all, the likes of former President John Dramani Mahama and Mr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah.

In the agriculture sector, the substantive Minister-in-Charge, Dr. Owusu Afriyie-Akoto has been doing the media rounds in recent weeks and masterfully explaining the yeomanly achievements of the Akufo-Addo Administration, including state-of-the-art and/or postindustrial and technical agrarian concepts and practices like the workings of the Commodity-Exchange Market, which the veteran agronomist wants to make integral to Ghana’s socioeconomic and political culture. This campaign is part of the very successful “Planting for Food and Jobs Program,” which yours truly has personally dubbed “Feed Ghana!” The NPP Communication Team’s operatives also need to highlight the fact that no government, other than the Gen. I K Acheampong-led National Redemption Council (NRC) junta, later renamed the Supreme Military Council (SMC-I), has been this successful in the postcolonial era.

Indeed, what makes the Akufo-Addo-implemented “Feed Ghana!” program unique is the fact that food production has been organically coupled with the construction of silage facilities across the country, with the long-term objective of stabilizing the prices of foodstuffs in the country all-year-round. And, by the way, Dr. Afriyie-Akoto also informs us that upon assumption of the democratic reins of governance by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, nearly every one of the food-storage facilities in the country had been allowed by the previous regimes to become dysfunctional or totally kaput. Ultimately, the success of the food-storage program also promises to stabilize the Ghana Cedi and the general strength and sustainability of the country’s economy.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com  Ghanaffairs

The views expressed by this author remain solely their own and are not to be taken as the view of the Editorial Board of www.africanewsanalysis.com,  www.zongonews.com and ZongoNews Media Group