Vice President, Alhaji Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, has said that Ghanaians should reject the hardship propaganda being circulated by the opposition party, the National Democratic Congress.
He said Ghanaians are better off under an NPP government than that of the NDC.
Dr. Bawumia was speaking at the 4th National Policy Summit in Tamale on Monday, 24 September 2018, on the theme: ”Assessing government’s flagship programmes”.
“The NPP, under Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, promised among other things, to change the education system, to introduce free senior high school education, to change the management of the economy from the focus on taxation to the focus on production, to change from most districts with no factories to a philosophy of one district-one factory, to change from a situation where most villages in the north have no dams to a position of one village-one dam, to change from the predominance of sole-sourcing from public procurement to tendering in procurement, to change from the abolishing of teacher trainee allowances to the restoration of teacher trainee allowances”, he said.
Recently, Dr. Bawumia and the NPP government have been under intense criticism for their lack of action on the incessant rising of fuel prices as well as the major trading currencies.
This criticism, Dr. Bawumia described as unfair, as he said though the Akufo-Addo led government is less than 2 years old, it has achieved what the NDC couldn’t achieve in 8 years.
“From the abolishing of nurse trainee allowances to the restoration of nurse trainee allowances, to change from a highly informal economy to the formalisation of the economy through digitisation, through the issuance of a national ID card, through the implementation of the national digital addressing system…to change from the rising debt-to-GDP ratio to the declining debt to GDP ratio, to change from a weakening banking system to a stronger banking system”, Dr. Bawumia stated.
According to Dr. Bawumia, under the NDC administration, there was high unemployment rate, a high fiscal deficit of 9.3 percent of GDP in 2016 coupled with a high public debt which pushed the debt-to-GDP ratio to 73.1 percent.
He said, “This was confirmed last week by Standard and Poor’s, a global rating agency which has upgraded Ghana’s ratings, sovereign credit rating from B- to B with a stable outlook. And, this is the first upgrade that Ghana has received in 10 years. In fact, we should recall that the NPP under President John Agyekum Kufuor left office with Ghana’s rating at B. After eight years of the NDC’s economic management, our ratings went from B to B-. This is after eight years! After only 20 months of new NPP government under Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, we have been upgraded from B- to B”.
In his view, the NDC superintended a failing National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), a weak banking sector and high unemployment situation.